


Apotheosis

by DesdemonaKaylose, neveralarch



Series: Banners from the Turrets [19]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Accidental Baby Acquisition, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Mad Science, Temporary Character Death, Vigilantism, Wakes & Funerals, a light spot of torture, corpses! children! god! we got everything!, you know the one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:02:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 30,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24629740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose, https://archiveofourown.org/users/neveralarch/pseuds/neveralarch
Summary: It's a nice life, while it lasts.You've seen the wedding, now how about a funeral?
Relationships: Megatron/Rung/Starscream (Transformers)
Series: Banners from the Turrets [19]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1265390
Comments: 181
Kudos: 159





	1. What Festivals of Atonement Will We Have to Invent

**Author's Note:**

> /slaps my hand down on the table and knocks all the sex comedy content onto the floor  
> are you ready for LARGE SAD ROBOTS?
> 
> We actually waited to publish this until the Pharma mini-arc was done. I can't believe we're nearly on _part twenty_. When the fuck. No explicit sexual content in this installment but there is/will be gun violence, discussions/depictions of death, and brief depictions of torture. Let us know if you need details.

“Excuse _me,”_ Starscream said, striding down the steps of the senate chambers with his cape flaring out behind him, “get your cowcatcher out of his face, you tin-plated amateur despot, he’s with me.”

Rung winced as the security mech in front of him stopped in his tracks and, red optics bright with fury, turned back to look at the senator. In the grand echoing lobby, you could have heard a firing pin drop.

“Darling,” Rung said, in a pained voice, “ _please.”_

Starscream flicked his wrist as if brushing off a buzzing nanobot. “How many times have you come to meet me at the building since I was elected? They should have known you a decade ago, let alone _now._ You idiots, do I need to get him chipped? Is that where we’re going with this? Having my lover chipped? Don’t you know _anything_ about civil liberties?”

The security mech, some kind of truck, ground his denta deep back in his jaw. Rung could see the servos working, and took another step outside of range just in case.

“I’m not interested in a political debate, senator,” the mech rumbled. “But maybe, and I’m just making a suggestion here, maybe if you got him a _visitor badge—”_

Starscream, hands on his hips, leaned up into the truck’s personal space. Despite being much slimmer and a head shorter than he had been at the height of the war, Starscream still moved with the absolute confidence of a heavy duty strafing jet.

“You should know him with or without any flimsy foil badge,” Starscream insisted. “You’re a Decepticon, aren’t you? Don’t you even know your own commanders?”

“Darling, it’s not an issue,” Rung said, hands fidgeting uneasily. “What with the increased threat level lately, it’s understandable that—”

“Threat level!” Starscream scoffed. “A few bomb-cellar-dwelling fanaticals start yelling about how terrible it is that we’ve got a democracy again, and the security forces act like we should close down the whole government!”

The truck was in danger of shattering one of his own teeth in his attempts to maintain some level of professionalism. “If I see any fanaticals,” he said, “I’ll be sure to send them your way.”

Starscream seemed ready to declare war, but Rung, who had edged around the perimeter of this encounter during this exchange, laid a hand carefully on Starscream’s elbow. “Come on,” he said, leaning away in the direction of the doors, “It’s really no harm. We can stop by the security office and request a badge for me next time. Your safety is important.”

Starscream glared at the security mech. “I don’t care about some restless MTO Autobots who barely saw service! I survived the battle of Tyger Pax with a blown turbine and half the Autobot army on my rudder! You _should_ send any would-be terrorists to me. If one of these ungrateful loudmouths has something to say to me, let’s hear him say it!”

Despite Starscream’s continued blustering, Rung pulled him down the hall and out of sight of the security officer, who looked like he was one more comment away from going quite off the handle.

“Let’s leave out the back,” Rung said, tugging Starscream along, “you can fly us to the market.”

At that, Starscream shook off his grip. “No,” he said, “no, there’s going to be press on the front steps, I have to make an appearance. I have to get the first soundbite in, before everyone else waddles out stuffed full of ten shanix oil-puffs.”

Starscream set off through the salvaged golden-age pillars without looking back. Rung raced after him.

“Couldn’t you just schedule something with Reflector later? The shop closes soon.” 

“This will only take a moment,” Starscream said. He laid his palms flat against the doors and threw them open to streaming midday sunlight, wings high. He cut a striking figure, his new hot pink and silver paint against the swath of blue sky. Despite his anxiety about the time, Rung took a moment to appreciate how comfortable Starscream looked, how _happy_ he was in his frame and his position. Down below there was a sharp clamor as some of the press caught sight of Rung’s beautiful senator. 

Two intrepid reporters, one of them speedily launching himself into a camera alt and caught by his partner’s quick hand, raced up the steps towards Starscream. Starscream didn’t even bother looking at them.

“Senator,” the one in root mode called out, “senator, how will you be voting tomorrow on the cold construction referendum? Are you worried that opening up the floor on this issue will bring tensions to a boil with the growing separatist movement?”

Starscream turned slightly, giving the camera his stern profile as he continued down the stairs, Rung scrambling in his wake. “We cannot simply allow our brothers and possible sisters to languish in cold storage because their government is _afraid_ to give them life. Those crystals are Cybertronians, regardless of how they may have been harvested! Not to mention, tomorrow’s voting public.”

“There’s been a lot of talk about returning to a golden-age divine rule,” the reporter went on, “What do you say to the critics who think the Prime should have executive power over the state?”

“Please,” Starscream said, “Optimus doesn’t even _want_ to run the government. He’s sick to death of making decisions. If anyone ever bothered to ask him, they’d already know that.”

“What do you think of Dai Atlas’ comment yesterday concerning the inherent immorality of cold construction?”

Starscream paused for just a fraction of a moment, just long enough to let Rung skip down another step and nearly trip on Starscream’s cape. Then he was moving again, a smile flickering across his mouth.

“We have some of the most brilliant minds in Cybertronian history offering to develop CNA reading for prenatal sparks,” Starscream said. “There’s never been a better time to be cold constructed. Where was _Dai Atlas_ when silver age factories were shoving sparks into frames at utter random? He certainly didn't seem to think it was his business _then._ I wonder if Dai Atlas is more worried about us cold constructs making lives for ourselves? But I suppose I’m not surprised that he’d rather _I_ didn’t exist.”

As their little party approached the bottom of the stairs, the reporter and his camera scrambled down and cut into Starscream’s path, blocking his way down from the last step.

“Just a few more questions,” the reporter said, matching direction with Starscream as Starscream tried to sidestep them. 

“That’s enough for today,” Starscream said, shooing them with an imperious hand. “I have personal business to attend to.”

Rung felt his shoulders relax. He’d worried that they were going to do a whole press conference while the market district quietly shut down. Starscream wasn’t above sabotaging Megatron’s anniversary gift, if the mood took him.

But no, Starscream hopped down the last step and turned back to Rung, a look of sly mischief in his red optics. He held out a hand, palm up, as if extending an invitation to dance. “Could I offer you a ride, doctor?”

Rung grinned at him, a little thrilled at the idea of being folded up into Starscream’s cabin space in front of so many people. Maybe there’d even be photos in the news casts? He reached out for Starscream’s hand, his mind already several minutes ahead. First the second-hand data shop run by that nice Camien transplant, to see if anyone had recently dredged up a fossil of literature that would delight Megatron. Then a treat for Starscream at the goodie shop, as a reward for managing his time so well—oh, and a nice little box of smokey crystals that Rung could feed to Megatron as he read his gift, popping them into his mouth one by—

A ringing _crack_ split the air.

Starscream whirled, battle protocols already alight, and in the space that his chest had occupied only a nanoklik before, Rung saw this:

The silver nose of a projectile, tearing through the air on its perfect journey to the place where Starscream’s spark should have been, 

And then Rung saw nothing. 

\---

When Megatron’s comm alert went off, he accepted it without more than a cursory check. “Starscream,” he said, “I’m working.”

There was a crackle of static, which at first seemed to mean nothing at all. And then Starscream’s voice, hoarse and emotionless: “He’s dead.”

Megatron stopped everything, a terrible dread rising up within him like a sludge of rust water. The theater became like a pantomime around him, a wall of static beyond which shapes moved in clumsy parody of life. 

“Commander,” he said, “I need you to specify who, _exactly,_ is dead.”

“Rung,” Starscream said, his voice a wreckage of static. “Rung is dead. There was a shooter in the square—a sniper—”

“Don’t do anything,” Megatron cut in. He was already striding out of the theater, down the aisle, ignoring Soundwave’s look of inquiry. “I’m coming to you now. Where are you?”

The hospital, let it be the hospital, let Starscream be exaggerating—

“We’re at the morgue,” Starscream said, “we—they took his body. They won’t let me in to see him, I’m not his conjunx, I’m not—”

“I’ll be there in ten kliks,” Megatron said. “Hold position. Don’t do anything stupid.”

Starscream choked on something that didn’t even resemble a laugh. “Too late.”

\---

Rung had always been small. He seemed especially so on a death slab designed to accommodate the average war frame, his limbs slightly akimbo as if he had been deposited in a hurry and then proved too unnerving of an object for any attendant to rearrange.

“In the old days the dead mech’s commander would have decided what to do with the body,” the mortician said. “These days, we try to follow the deceased’s wishes.”

“I’m familiar with the process,” said Megatron. He’d been to the Tetrahex morgue before, several times. Always for a suicide. Decepticon veterans had a tendency to list him as the executor of their frame, if they had no one else. The more idealistic still saw him as their savior and shepherd, to ensure they were remembered in death. The disaffected recognized that all they were giving him was a problem, and probably laughed about it in the allspark.

If there was an allspark. Megatron had never believed in it.

“I don’t have any instructions or executors listed here,” said the mortician. “So then we go to endurae, and given that you were his conjunx _and_ his commanding officer normally I would say there’s no conflict here, but—”

The mortician glanced through the frosted glass of the door, to where Starscream’s shadow could be seen fitfully pacing. 

“I’m given to understand he had several, er, paramours,” the mortician went on, “and frankly I’ve never encountered a situation quite like this one. The senator is pressing for a full state burial, with war hero honors.”

Megatron stood there, staring at the dark little body. Without the blue light pouring out, its spark glass was a dull blank green. The bullet had blown off everything below the right optic in a downward trajectory, so that the base of the spinal strut was simply carved away. The optic, warped from the heat of the projectile, hung in a nest of broken wires.

The mortician was _still_ talking. “Given that he’s not actually _decorated_ _—_ not to mention, a Decepticon—I told the senator that wasn’t very likely.”

“If it had not been for this mech,” Megatron ground out, “there would be no precious Autobot peace in which to _award_ decorations to soldiers.”

The mortician stiffened. “Er,” he said, “yes, I see. So you would also like to press for intact burial? I rather thought that was a bit… against praxis, for Decepticons.”

Megatron looked down at the frame. Scavenged for parts and the rest melted down for sentio metallico, that was the Decepticon way. One of the earliest feats-cum-outrages of the revolution had been the burning of the old Towers mausoleums, with their wasteful gilted apartments for millenia-dead mechs. 

“Not to mention,” said the mortician, “there’s not much left to preserve…” 

“Full state burial,” said Megatron. “War hero’s honors. If a cog goes missing, I’ll know exactly who to blame.”

He left the mortician sputtering behind him and strode out into the hall. Starscream slammed into his chest an instant later, his hand reaching for the closing door to the viewing room.

“I want to see him!” shrieked Starscream.

“No.” Megatron caught both of Starscream’s wrists and steered him back into a hard visitor’s chair. “That’s not him in there, Starscream, it’s just a frame.”

“You’re not taking him apart!” Starscream twisted and tried to kick. “He’s going to be buried, I’ve got aides already drafting the legislation, I’ll kill you if you—”

“He’s going to be buried,” agreed Megatron. “I’ll dig the trench myself if I must.”

Starscream deflated with a long whistling hiss of hot air. Without the rage animating him, his optics were blank and his hands were shaking. There were still splashes of dried energon on his frame, from where he’d held Rung as he—

No. That wasn’t a productive train of thought.

“Let me take you home,” said Megatron.

Starscream didn’t fight as Megatron tugged him to his feet and led him away. He wasn’t in a state to fly, so Megatron called them a transport and sat with Starscream in the back, holding Starscream tight against his side. When they got to their building, it was Megatron who called the elevator and Megatron who let them into the apartment. It was Megatron who ushered Starscream into their washracks and Megatron who gently cleaned the energon from Starscream’s frame.

There was no room in him for grief, only a burgeoning, growing sense of purpose.

The apartment was littered with reminders that only this morning Rung had still been a living, functioning mech. One of his cheesy romance novels lying on the sofa. His polish in the washracks. His spare glasses on the bedside table. Megatron ignored all of them as he laid Starscream on the berth they’d all shared.

Starscream snatched up Rung’s favorite pillow and curled around it, his wings pressed against his frame so tightly they creaked. Megatron turned off the lights and laid down on his back, looking up at the empty ceiling.

“It’s my fault he’s dead,” whispered Starscream, into the dark. “He wanted to go out the back of the senate offices, but I wanted to parade in front of the press. And the shot, they were shooting at _me,_ if I’d just stayed put I could’ve—”

“Stop,” said Megatron.

“I’m just telling you,” said Starscream, his voice gaining strength, “it’s my fault, it’s—”

“I know whose fault this is,” said Megatron. “And you’ll help me see that sniper dead before Rung’s frame is in the ground.”

\---

It had already been a very long evening by the time that Requiem agreed to open up the morgue so that they could get a look at what they were left with. Technically, the morgue was subject to the same chain of command as any of the other medical wards, but that did Ratchet little good since his authority dead-ended with the surgical side of operations. Deadlock, despite being the right-hand mech of the hospital’s director, had no _actual_ authority without Rung behind him. 

And Rung—well, Rung wasn’t behind anyone anymore, was he? Except maybe behind his slagheap of a senator roommate, who’d apparently taken one look at this depressing cockup and immediately dumped the whole thing into Deadlock’s lap.

Ratchet knew he should be thinking about the leadership vacuum at the top of the hospital, and who could be tapped to fill it. It was easier to think venomous thoughts at Starscream instead.

Deadlock paced up and down the length of the morgue, two fingers pressed to his audio pickups in the universal sign language for “don’t talk to me, I’m already in the middle of something.” Ratchet sighed and leaned his hip against the slab. 

“No one else was supposed to die,” Ratchet said, addressing a corpse that couldn’t hear him anyway. “It was supposed to be _over,_ Rung.”

Of course Starscream had known Deadlock wouldn’t refuse. Wouldn’t, couldn’t. He’d loved Rung too much, for too long, in ways that honestly made Ratchet’s head hurt a little bit to contemplate. It was Starscream who had given them both the news—all at once, in the same breath that he’d announced he wasn’t going to be able to arrange the funeral himself, so Deadlock would have to do it.

“Anyway,” Starscream had said, distractedly testing the sealant on his new orange highlights, “you’re the only one with a copy of his contacts list.”

Just like that. Ratchet never hated Starscream the way Deadlock did, but by Primus he was learning how to now. There had been so many calls to make. Deadlock had spent the whole day at his desk, making calls, while Ratchet dropped in between surgical consultations to make sure he was fueling because what else could he do? There were arrangements to make: burial permits to request, an empty lot to purchase, a gravemarker to select. And then the scheduling, the invitations, the dreaded _I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this_ calls. Ratchet had come to check in towards the end of the day and found Deadlock pouring over the guest list from the conjunxing ceremony years ago, marking off guests one by one.

And then the body. By the time Ratchet had clocked out for the day, there was nothing left to do but face the body.

Out of a morbid desire to see the extent of the damage—he’d never held himself back from the ugly aftermath before—Ratchet pressed two fingers to the helm and tilted the face back until he could see the hollow corridor underneath Rung’s optic. It was neater than he expected, as if someone had come behind and soldered loose wires back together to clean up the wound. Someone had touched up his paint too. Even his ruined helm had patches of orange where it should’ve been gray. Were they planning on putting him back together for the funeral? During wartime that would have been an almost profane waste of resources, and some part of him still recoiled from it. Playacting at serenity when Rung’s life had been taken with violence.

“It’s not like _you’ll_ know the difference,” Ratchet said, lowering the empty helm back down to the slab. The sightless optics, one gently warped from heat exposure, reflected back chill fluorescent light.

Look at me, he thought, mourning Decepticons. Throughout the imprisonment and the long peace process, he had never _really_ thought of Rung as a Decepticon. It was how he kept it all clean in his head. Decepticons are the enemy, and polite, pleasant little Rung is a contractor. Basically a neutral. Certainly not a _fanatic_ like Deadlock or any of the other thousand resentful battle-edged grunts. And he’d maintained that line, too, even as he grew closer to Deadlock and came to terms with Rung’s all-too-passionate relationship with a significant subset of the Decepticon elite. Rung was in a category of his own.

Watching Deadlock pace the vault of the morgue, fangs gritted, violence barely restrained by the endless slog of work, Ratchet was getting a new sense of what Rung had actually represented for ‘Cons like Deadlock. 

Having someone care. Having someone care about more than whether you’d been patched up watertight enough to withstand the next assault. A quiet place for an hour, if you needed somewhere to hide. Someone who wouldn’t break your arm for reaching out.

It must have meant something, to at least a handful of them. Deadlock was on the line with someone named Breakdown; just based on the shape of Deadlock’s silence, right now the mech’s name was cruelly on the nose. 

Ratchet wasn’t afraid of much, but he’d felt something cold in his spark, in the office as Starscream fidgeted with his bright memorial paint. The look on Deadlock’s face, in the first moment of understanding, had been horrible—the way his mouth peeled open, the way his shoulders hunched, his wild eyes. Ratchet had been frozen, watching someone he’d been learning to care for transforming into the desperate battlefield wraith that so few Autobots had ever survived to speak of seeing. 

Starscream might have, in his selfishness, done the kindest thing anyone could do for Deadlock. His grief was a feral thing, and Ratchet had no idea how to contain it except with more work. Work had always been the cage for Ratchet’s own grief. 

He looked down at Rung’s empty frame again. Rung would’ve known what to do. How to heal from this. 

“Okay, Breakdown,” said Deadlock. “I have to go, I’m sorry. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, no, it’s sweet of you to offer. Yeah. Bye.” His hands dropped from his helm and he came to a stop by gently resting his head on the wall.

“Done with the calls for tonight?” asked Ratchet.

“No, Ratch, I have like forty more to go.” Deadlock sighed and ground his forehead against the metal that sealed them off from the rest of the world.

“Done with the calls for _tonight?”_ repeated Ratchet. 

Deadlock didn’t respond, so Ratchet walked over to him, catching Deadlock by the waist and pulling him into something halfway between a hug and a restraint.

“You don’t have to do this alone,” said Ratchet. “Make Starscream do something.”

“If Starscream even thinks about the funeral arrangements, he’s going to have a meltdown and all of Cybertron is going to have to deal with the fallout,” said Deadlock, tiredly. “Megatron’s keeping him occupied with other business, I don’t know what.”

“He wasn’t too occupied to do a mourning repaint,” grumbled Ratchet.

“I’ve booked us for tomorrow morning.” Deadlock turned in Ratchet’s arms to swipe his thumbs over Ratchet’s cheeks. “Before our shifts. It’ll take five minutes.”

Ratchet thought about arguing, but no. He wouldn’t do that here. If Deadlock needed him to wear Rung’s colors, he’d wear them.

“Sometimes,” murmured Deadlock, “when we lost people on the field, we’d dip our hands into their broken tanks and smear their energon over our faces.”

Ratchet had seen ‘Cons marked like that in battles. He’d always thought it was some kind of ghoulish warning. Not that he had any room to talk, always spattered with energon up to the elbows.

“I’m glad that Rung died during peace, if he had to die at all,” said Deadlock. He was staring over Ratchet’s shoulder, at the frame behind them. “I’m glad we have time to give him a better send-off.”

“Are you going to have the frame fully repaired?” asked Ratchet. He didn’t know what a peacetime Decepticon send-off would look like. He hadn’t attended a funeral since… before the war, probably. He couldn’t remember.

“No, Rung wouldn’t want that.” Deadlock disentangled himself from the hug, took a few steps over to the slab. “I only came because, because—” 

He picked up the frame’s hand, so careful with its fragile structure. He raised it, and delicately kissed the knuckles. “Goodbye,” he whispered.

Ratchet didn’t look away, not even when he wanted to, not even when the tears began to fall.

\---

Megatron’s comm rang for the third time in twenty klicks, and this time he answered. It was pure practicality. The calls were coming at random intervals, and Megatron couldn’t risk even a moment’s distraction when they began the raid. On the other hand, he couldn’t shut down comms and lose a potential route of communication with Starscream.

He’d finally gotten Soundwave to stop calling. If he could warn off his own amica, he could surely do it to Starscream’s therapist. 

“Yes,” he said, and then waved his hand at Starscream and mouthed ‘I’m not talking to you.’ He should’ve had the voiceless comms installed when he had the chance.

“Sir,” said Aglet, who’d never lost his wary politeness even when he was tagging along with Rung to see one of Megatron’s premieres. “Have you seen Starscream recently?”

Starscream was recalibrating one of his bulky new shoulder-cannons, cursing as he singed his talons on a loose wire. He looked more like himself than he had in decades, his slim frame hidden by hastily-welded weaponry. More like the vicious brawler Megatron had taken in and molded into an assassin. If Megatron reduced the sharpness of his optics, he could almost pretend that it was a millenia ago, before the insurgency burst into all-out war. The empty office building they were squatting in could be a revolutionary bunker, and that anticipation on Starscream’s face might be eager instead of exhausted. Megatron wouldn’t have a hole in his spark where his conjunx used to be.

“Sir?” said Aglet.

“What did you say?” asked Megatron.

“Starscream,” Aglet repeated. “I’ve been trying to reach him for days, but he’s blocked me from his comms.”

Megatron turned away from Starscream to look down through the window onto the street. “He’s busy.” 

“With respect, sir,” Aglet said, sounding as if he didn’t mean it in the least, “he can’t possibly be that busy. I’ve tried calling Rattrap, and Rattrap hasn’t spoken to him since the assassination. Prowl said the same. In fact, no one seems to have even seen Starscream since he handed off the funeral to Deadlock. He sent an aide to cast his vote on the MTO debate referendum in absentia. That referendum was years in the set up—I’ve been hearing about this push to defrost the wartime spark cache for longer than Starscream has had _ankles.”_

“He’s in mourning,” growled Megatron. “Would you have him pretend that it’s just a normal week? Swan into the Senate and chat with the reporters?”

Starscream made a noise, so Megatron walked out of the room and into the hall, closing the door behind him. He couldn’t have a distracted Starscream, not when they were so close.

“Do you want,” said Megatron, “do you want him to act as if he doesn’t _care?”_

“No,” said Aglet. “No, of course not.”

“Then what _do_ you want?” Megatron had to force himself not to punch the wall. The office building might be empty, but too much noise might flush their quarry from the warehouse opposite which he was sheltering in. If they had the right intelligence. If he really was there.

“You sound upset,” said Aglet. “It’s not unusual to struggle with your emotions during the difficult times. I know you’ve never had a therapist, but given the circumstances—”

Megatron took a deep vent and cycled down his engine. “If you don’t get to the point,” he said, calmly, “I’ll go to your office myself and rip your transmitter out of your sorry little helm.”

“The point,” Aglet said, voice hardening, “is that Starscream isn’t alright. I know him, and I _know_ he’s struggling with this. Who wouldn’t be struggling? You think you’re helping, keeping him busy, but you’re just making him push his emotions down until he drowns in them. He needs to talk to someone.”

“You mean talk to you,” Megatron said. “Are you _really_ in any position to counsel Starscream right now? Rung was your mentor. You must have some feeling about it.”

“Of course I have feeling,” snapped Aglet, and Megatron smiled. That was the first real emotion he’d heard polite, careful, competent Aglet express in years.

Then he remembered why Aglet was currently so _emotional_ and the smile disappeared.

“Rung left me as the most senior therapist on Cybertron,” said Aglet. “Ratchet’s taken on his administrative work, but I’m the one who’s having to find places for his clients, I’m the one answering all of the difficult psychiatric questions, I’m the one dealing with this fragging therapy education program that he left me with! Fifteen trainee therapists, all ready to learn from the great Rung, the mech who literally wrote the book, and now I have to tell them that he’s _died_ and they’re stuck with me instead! And when I have five minutes to myself, when I _could_ be staring at the wall and trying to wrap my processor around what’s happened, instead I’m calling you and Rattrap and Prowl and everyone else who might have seen Starscream, because Rung made him my responsibility. Do you understand? Rung trusted me to help him!”

“It sounds,” said Megatron, “like you’re a little overworked.”

There were a few soft clicks as Aglet reset his vocalizer. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—”

“Allow me to lighten your burden,” said Megatron. “Starscream is _my_ responsibility. I will take care of him. He doesn’t need you.”

“Sir,” snarled Aglet, “if you don’t tell me where he is, I’ll—”

The door opened, and Starscream stuck his helm into the hall. “Ready?” he asked. “I’ve set the detonators for ten minutes.”

“Starscream,” said Megatron. “Tell Aglet he’s fired.”

Starscream’s mouth worked. “Aglet?”

“I don’t have time to deal with him,” said Megatron. “And you don’t need him right now. Tell him so.”

Starscream took a few cautious steps up to Megatron. He looked small again, despite the cannons on his shoulders and the guns on his hips.

“Aglet?” he said, into Megatron’s comm pickup.

“Starscream!” yelled Aglet. “Whatever you’re doing, stop doing it and come to my office! I need to talk to you before you—”

“No,” said Starscream. “I don’t want to talk to you. I’ll call you later, _if_ I decide that’s what I want. I’m busy.”

“Starscream,” said Aglet, “Rung would want you to—”

“I’m doing this for Rung,” said Starscream. He was shaking, but he steadied himself against Megatron. “We’ll do it and it won’t be better but it’ll—it’ll be done. I’ll call you later. Maybe.”

There was a silence. Six minutes until the detonators went off.

“Fine,” said Aglet. “I’ll see you at the funeral?”

Starscream hummed noncommittally. “If we’re done by then.”

“What? Starscream, it’s _tomorrow,_ you can’t miss—”

Megatron hung up. “We have to go.”

Starscream stared at him, unseeing, but then he shook himself and patted Megatron on the arm.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Wouldn’t want to miss the explosion.”

\---

After days of preparations and phone calls and clinging to Ratchet while they tried to sleep, the day of the funeral felt like a relief. Deadlock hated that, but he knew Rung would be glad that he’d found some respite.

The path of the hearse had taken them from the morgue on a steady and straightforward procession out of the city limits, out into the rolling stretch of bismuth-studded flatland that had proved too soft and brittle for urban expansion centuries on centuries ago. Patches of oily rainbow glinted in the sunlight, their metal cool beneath the sweltering heat.

Deadlock flipped out of alt and smoothed out the modest grey cloak he’d dug up for the occasion. It felt heavy in his hands, as he clipped it to his shoulders, heavier than it should have. It wasn’t a particularly nice cloak. He already felt self-conscious about having to face so many Decepticons over the casket of one of their own—someone he was responsible for, someone he’d failed to _protect_ —after he’d gone soft, gotten easy, practically settled _down…_

Ratchet pulled up behind him, engine idling, with Optimus Prime trundling along on his fender. Deadlock determinedly kept his gaze fixed on the growing crowd across the glittering plain, counting their bodies like the bodies of a military formation—friend or foe, he wasn’t certain. The open grave lay below like a grey shadow cast from the speaker’s podium.

Deadlock busied himself with unfolding the plugin containing his speech, plugging one end into his helm port and pushing the transparent pane down in front of his optic like a sniper’s targeting screen.

“Is that _Red Alert?”_ Ratchet demanded, shading his optics against the harsh burn of the sun. “How in God’s name did _they_ know each other?”

“Yeah, uh, a little while back someone finally convinced him to see a therapist for his glitch.” Deadlock clicked on the display, fiddling the resolution up and down until it was reasonably comfortable to look at while doing something else. “Far as I know, he took it into his head that the only safe therapist was a therapist who didn’t want him and wasn’t looking for patients. Rung had to get his license renewed just to take him on. He’s been doing weekly appointments with Rung after work since last year. You didn’t know? He’s one of yours.”

“I don’t know what every Autobot is doing every day,” Ratchet grumbled.

Behind them, Optimus made a little exhausted sound. “Try stopping by Prowl’s office a couple times a quartex. I guarantee it’ll keep you in the loop.”

Deadlock turned to the hearse. “You want me to help you get the coffin out?”

“It’s fine,” the hearse said, “honestly I just gotta thank you for putting him in something watertight, I keep getting these vets who think you can just shove a corpse in somebody’s trunk and drive off. Ain’t sanitary. I get all kinds of goo in my seams, and that ain’t healthy, you know?”

Optimus’ mouth twisted unhappily. Deadlock, who was not squeamish, said, “Yeah, I’m familiar.”

The hearse gave a shiver of his deep purple plating and then transformed into root mode in one smooth unfolding of components. The artfulness of it caught Deadlock off guard: rolling violet panels, the coffin blooming up from the empty space and caught easily in the undertaker’s arms. The relentless yellow sun, the deep morbid violet—Deadlock blinked back a wave of washer fluid, confused and annoyed, uncertain what exactly had set it off. He scrubbed quickly at the edge of his optical array with the back of his hand, and then pretended not to notice the hearse pretending not to notice him do it.

“I thought you weren’t going to have the frame repaired,” said Ratchet.

Deadlock dropped his arm and frowned at him. “I didn’t.”

Ratchet was peering through the clear pane on the front of the spark-shaped coffin, inside of which Rung was curled helm to knees in a perfect circle. It was a simple case design—elegant without being opulent, just right for Rung—easily supported in the arms of the hearse. Ratchet took another hard look at the frame inside it.

“Looks pretty repaired to me.” Ratchet had a deep frown on his face, tapping the glass pointedly. “His head is all back together. Look.”

Deadlock shifted closer, peering over Ratchet’s shoulder. It _was_ back together. “Who—”

“Starscream?” Ratchet guessed. “One of his lackies?”

Deadlock made a tight, irritated noise. Of all the stupid, wasteful, unhelpful things...

With all the damage patched up so cleanly, the paint perfect, the warped optic replaced and sitting dark below the brows, Rung’s frame looked too much like a peaceful sleeper curled up in a stasis tube. The urge to look away bubbled up in Deadlock, powerful and unnerving. He’d seen so much carnage in his life without flinching; this simulacrum of life was somehow harder to stomach.

“You got it under control?” Ratchet asked, and then there was a hesitant hand on Deadlock’s shoulder, hovering before settling. “Optimus can do it, you don’t _have_ to. He’s used to giving unpleasant talks.”

“No,” Deadlock shrugged him off. “No, I want to do it. I feel like I gotta say some stuff, and this is probably my last chance to say it. You and Optimus can go on up ahead, I’m just gonna get my speech pulled up and check in.”

“It’s always so unnerving when you call him by his name,” Ratchet said, scrunching up his faceplate.

Deadlock managed to cock a sideways smile, and then called back, “Hey, Prime, you keep an optic on Ratchet, got me?”

“Of course,” Optimus said, solemnly. Typical Prime. Always so goddamn sincere.

The two of them went on down the slow roll of the hill on foot, waving at a few old Autobot friends, leaving Deadlock alone with the hearse. The glass casing of Rung’s coffin glinted sharp and clear beneath the sun.

Deadlock ran a systems check to calm himself down. He could still so vividly remember the last time he’d been in a real graveyard—at the beginning of the war, carrying bolt cutters. They had blown the gates to the necropolis wide, spilling masonry and corpses into the arms of the horrified gentry. He’d so hated the delicacy of the mausoleums, the way they hid the brutality of death that he saw every day in the streets. But then later, after the war had dug its treads deep into the planet, there were only rust-soaked battlefields full of the unburied dead. They would scavenge what they could in the dark, between Autobot patrols, hoarding precious fuel and parts that they didn’t have the resources to fabricate. It was equality of horror.

This… this would be nice. Maybe he’d even be able to visit Rung’s resting place, when he needed to talk.

The speech was loaded. He carefully pinned a twist of orange scrap to his cloak, right by his throat. “Well,” Deadlock said, partly to the undertaker but really to Rung’s unmoving frame. “Let’s finish it.”

Deadlock set his shoulders and led the hearse down the hill.

It should have been Megatron and Starscream, walking with Rung’s frame into the field below. Knowing Starscream, he’d probably burst in at the last minute, somehow both untouchable and openly weeping. Deadlock _was_ surprised that Megatron wasn’t there. Maybe he was shepherding Starscream, keeping him from committing mass murder or blowing up buildings or fabricating a giant statue of Rung to be placed in the hospital’s courtyard.

That made Deadlock smile, just for a moment. Rung deserved a statue.

At the graveside, Deadlock fished out a vial of glowing green fuel and set it down with the little collection of matching bottles, on the still-uncarved marker. There were six, no, seven - one had to be from Aglet, and Deadlock had spotted Ratchet filling a vial this morning. Who had left the others? Deadlock looked up to scan the crowd, and spotted Pharma hanging around the back, looking haggard as he talked to the Velocitronian doctor, Knock Out. Still no sign of Megatron or Starscream, though there was a big empty space at the front for them. Ratchet was standing next to that space looking thunderous, with Optimus’ hand on his shoulder more like restraint than comfort.

The undertaker settled Rung’s coffin on the ground, in front of the podium and next to the open grave. Deadlock stood there, looking at the empty frame for a full minute, trying to figure out what to do. He’d assumed that he would have to wait for Starscream to say his piece, maybe drag him down from the podium when he got violent. He’d assumed that Megatron would read a poem.

Instead it was just him and a little crowd of maybe fifty mechs, and the corpse waiting for the ground.

He’d written a speech. He supposed he should say it.

He dragged himself to the podium and looked out at the gathered Decepticons, Autobots, and lost-looking neutrals. The medics and the patients. The people who’d loved Rung, almost as much as he loved them.

He waited another moment, just in case Starscream came shrieking out of the sky, and then he resigned himself to saying what he’d come here to say. “Thanks, uh, thank you all for coming,” Deadlock said, smoothing his hands nervously along the top of the podium. “I’ve never been to a high-class funeral before but… I think you usually start by talking about Primus.”

His gaze slipped into the middle distance, vaguely hovering over the shine of the coffin casting blue reflections of light onto the modest mound of grave dirt.

“Where I came up, everyone believed in Primus—I mean, some people hated Him, and some people lived in fear of Him, but everyone believed. You had to, or you couldn’t climb out of the dumpster every morning and drag yourself off for another day of trying to live. Nothing was in _our_ control, so it had to be in someone else’s. For a while I hated God too. And then I met Rung. We talked a lot about faith and religion after we met, which—yeah, the ‘Cons here all know that wasn’t something you could really talk about during the war.” Deadlock twisted the cloak-pin absently. “Not with most people. But you could talk about anything with Rung. I had a lot to say, as it turns out. We spent a lot of long nights together when I was on base. Rung never minded.” 

The crowd felt like it was leaning in, holding its breath. Like making a noise would shatter the moment and bring them back into reality.

"Rung never believed in Gods,” Deadlock went on. “He used to say that if Primus did exist, then it must be our job to do better than Him, so I won't talk about Primus now. I’ll just talk about us. You and me, and the legacy we share. And if there is an after-spark, I hope that—"

Deadlock paused, finials twitching, at the faint sound of tapping. Who was tapping. Why were they tapping during his speech. It wasn’t _that_ long.

“I hope that—”

His wartime protocols prickled at the back of his processor, remembering landmines and timed detonators. He swallowed down a wave of nervous energy.

“I—”

The edge of the podium cracked underneath his fingers. Plating down the length of his spinal strut rustled and lifted.

“Who the hell,” he said, abruptly stepping out from behind the podium, “is making that—”

His gaze dropped to the ground. Blue light spilled over the glittering dirt, not reflected from the coffin glass as he’d assumed at first, but shining out now in earnest from _inside_ of it. 

A single, uncurled, coppery hand was pressing against the rim of the case, fingers tapping at odd intervals. The perfect circle of spark-glass was alive with flaring blue.

“Holy Primus’ forging hand,” Deadlock breathed, “that’s not, not possible— _Ratchet!_ Ratchet, get up here _now!”_

In the second before Ratchet scrambled around the open grave to his side, Deadlock dropped to the ground and started fumbling with the coffin case, searching for a latch. The whole rim was perfectly smooth, welded shut and sanded down, without a hinge to be found. Perfect preservation for an immaculate corpse—

Deadlock swore, talons scrabbling uselessly at the seal. What a stupid, _stupid_ time to have followed the official parole regulations. “I don’t have a—I’m not allowed to carry—”

There was a weight of presence at his back. “Here,” someone said, “let me.”

Deadlock looked up to find the mask-locked face of Optimus Prime, who had pulled a sturdy old fashioned service pistol from his subspace. 

“What!” Ratchet hollered, grabbing his friend by the wrist. “Are you crazy? You can’t fire that thing point blank, do you want him to lose the other side of his head?”

Optimus hesitated. Then he tucked away his pistol, braced himself on Deadlock’s shoulder, and put his fist straight through the glass casing with a crunch that burst into glittering shards. The air went strange and electric.

“Oh my god,” muttered Deadlock. When the hand shot up through the broken glass he immediately grabbed for it, reeling Rung’s very much animate and still-functioning body out of the ruined coffin.

Rung hit the ground knees-first, vents flared and pouring heat. His optics were flickering, running a start-up cycle like a freshly forged protoform. 

“Starscream,” Rung managed, “where’s—Starscream—”

Deadlock’s hand reflexively tightened around Rung’s; he looked up, sharing a look with Ratchet that said ten thousand things, nine thousand of which were “Where the frag _is_ Starscream?”

The metal in his hand was hot, alive with an electro-magnetic field. Deadlock was vaguely aware of an uproar somewhere beyond the circle of this moment, but it was all a wash of surf to him, meaningless noise and color. His actuators were shaking. 

Ratchet shook him by the shoulder. “Deadlock,” he hissed, “Deadlock, look.” 

Reluctantly, Deadlock lifted his head. He followed the line of Ratchet’s finger. Out beyond the crowd of distressed mourners, half of them with weapons clutched in hand, the flatland was glittering. Not just glittering with specks of bismuth oxidizing in the sunshine, but bloom after bloom of yellow sparklight, stretching far and away.

“Primus,” Deadlock whispered.

“Are those all,” Optimus swallowed, “are those all corpses too?”

“No,” Deadlock said shakily, “no, there were only a couple other mechs buried here, there’s too many of them.”

Fumbling, Deadlock pulled Rung up off the ground and clutched him against his chest, wrapping the smaller body in as much protection as he was capable of giving. Rung was feeling around his own helm with clumsy fingers, trying to locate something he could probably only half remember, unaware of the miracle they were all living inside of. Deadlock shuddered with the weight of something strange and holy, holding Rung tight.

“Mechs,” Deadlock said, “...I think we’re standing in a _hot spot.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cover by [Red-thedragon](https://red--thedragon.tumblr.com/)


	2. April is the Cruelest Month

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rung is alive, and no one knows what to make of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay! It took us a while to get this out because we wanted to finish a draft of part three before we put part two up, but now we are done with that! Oof. There will be an epilogue after part three to wrap up this arc, so you'll note the chapter count just ticked up. Also if you like playlists I just finished moving my [Banners playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6CpPJzcSKdAGFNqOfSSf0H?si=rG96OSdURWKZOBOY51A56w) over to spotify so help yourself to that.
> 
> This chapter opens with a scene containing torture.

A siren wailed in the distance. Starscream, filthy with dust and muck and boiled off condensation streaking his rattling plates, paused in the middle of securing his quarry to the floor of the abandoned factory.

The siren faded. Megatron, standing by the door, made a curt gesture. Starscream returned to his task.

“This is bringing back memories,” said Starscream, cheerfully. He almost felt alive again, with energon on his hands and a body pinned beneath him with a rusty metal rebar stabbed through its chassis and anchored into the ground. “How do you want me to disassemble him, mighty Megatron?”

“Slowly,” said Megatron. “Make him suffer.”

Starscream hummed and yanked off a piece of the mech’s oversized shoulder. The mech just grunted, playing hard to get.

Everyone started out strong. Starscream pulled a hacksaw out of his subspace.

“We used to do this all the time,” Starscream confided to the mech on the floor, as he cut away the connectors and cables holding hand to wrist. “Him watching, me working. Did you know that? Before there was an army and a spec ops team and  _ Vortex _ , there was me. And I was good at this.”

The mech on the floor did something with his remaining hand, and instead of looking to see what sort of lockpin or hacker’s trick he had over there, Starscream just slammed the blunt tip of the saw through the gap in wrist plating, hard enough to lodge deep and sever the cables of the mech’s arm entirely.

The mech couldn’t quite swallow his scream. Starscream smiled and left the saw where it was. He could do the rest with knives.

“Did you ever think you were going to get away with your little plot?” he asked, as he peeled away the mech’s armor, strip by strip. “Even if you’d killed me, I like to think Megatron would have tracked you down and crushed your helm. Or maybe Prowl would have found you first.”

That made the mech’s remaining optic flash. “Prowl wouldn’t avenge you,” he snarled. “You don’t mean anything to him.”

“I’m his  _ amica,” _ said Starscream. He’d opened up a hole big enough to reach in and tear out a fistful of the mech’s cables, so he did.

The mech convulsed, his face going rigid with pain. “You’re a pawn,” he choked out. “A Decepticon. Worth  _ nothing _ dead.”

“Hmm.” Starscream watched the gush of oil from the mech’s innards. “You know, I’m sick of talking about myself. Let’s talk about Rung.”

There was a crackle of static, some sound of pain forcibly throttled in the vocalizer. Finally, it clicked back on. “...Who?”

Starscream was still for a moment, and then he jammed his hand back through the hole and  _ twisted. _

“The mech you  _ shot,”  _ Starscream hissed. “You blew his helm in on the steps of the senate building, is that ringing any bells? Did you think this was about  _ me? _ I like a good assassination as much as the next conniving bastard, if you’d just tried to kill  _ me _ I probably would have put you on my payroll!”

The joints of his fingers were soaked with oil, hydraulic fluid, maybe even energon now. Starscream kept twisting. The Autobot flinched before he could stop himself.

“Collateral,” the bot managed, his severed wrist-casing grinding against the floor, “there’s— collateral damage, sometimes, to get results you have to—”

Another yank silenced the mech, left room for more of Starscream’s fury. “You blew his processor out like some half-aft gangland execution! I had cranial fluid in seams I didn’t even know I  _ had!” _

Starscream reached down and pulled the mech’s mouthplate free, exposing the cheap intake that most MTO designs had defaulted to. He tossed the plate across the warehouse floor.

“And now Megatron is late to  _ his _ funeral because  _ you _ think you deserve to live when  _ he _ died! You think you’re some kind of revolutionary, Autobot? You think you’re some kind of hero? Do you think the world  _ owes _ you something, just because the war ended before you had a chance to be anything more than another sorry, washed-up MTO?”

There was a sudden shifting from Megatron’s corner of the space, but Starscream ignored it.

“My name is  _ Getaway, _ ” the Autobot snapped, “I was handpicked by Prowl, infiltrator first class!” 

“Oh, you have a  _ name,”  _ Starscream cooed. “Like  _ Rung _ did, hm? The mech you shot? You do remember him now, don’t you? The  _ medic _ you shot? The mech who wanted cobbled-together junk-drawer MTOs like  _ you _ to have a chance at a real life?”

“Starscream,” Megatron said, suddenly. Starscream ignored him. 

“And you know what? You know what the  _ really funny _ thing is? He probably would have let you walk for this! He probably would have said you’re stunted and traumatized and lashing out because blah blah blah the world is cruel and war is hell. But he’s not  _ here, _ is he? You just have  _ me, _ Getaway,” Starscream hooked his talons into the soft inside of Getaway’s intake and twisted the Autobot to face him. “You just have  _ me,  _ and by the time I’m done with you, we’re going to redefine the world  _ hell.” _

_ “Starscream,” _ Megatron said, sharply, and there was a heavy sound of his machinery hitting the ground. “Stop.”

_ “Stop?” _ Starscream snarled. “I’m just getting started!”

Megatron slashed a hand through the air, flat palm, a military gesture even Starscream couldn’t pretend not to recognize. “I need you to be quiet,” Megatron said. His other hand was at his comm array, his expression intent. “I’m getting—this must be some glitch, or else—”

There was a fizzle, the sound of a comm array switching to speaker, and then the color drained out of Megatron’s optics as the tinny voice echoing through his comm said—

“—gatron? Megatron? Please, pick up, I’m—”

The knife in Starscream’s hand hit the floor with an ugly clang. He stared at Megatron. Megatron stared back, mouth open and speechless.

“Megatron? Please, I want—” the little voice nearly begged. “Megatron, where are you?”

\---

Rung woke for the second time in as many days to the sound of a spark monitor beeping fitfully and an external fuel pump slowly wheezing away somewhere above his head. The interesting thing about that, he reflected, wasn’t as much what he was hearing but rather that he was awake to hear it at all. His last memory was, in fact, of having his helm blown out like so much hot confetti.

No, that wasn’t quite right. There had been—a dream? A stress dream, maybe. He’d been outside the city, surrounded by people, and he hadn’t been able to find—

There was a hiss as a door slid open. Rung realized with a start that his optics weren’t online. Shouldn’t they be online?

“What took you so long?” said Deadlock.

“Reporters,” said Optimus. “They’ve staked out every fuel cafe in a three-mile radius, and they desperately want to know my opinion about the hot spot, the cold construction bill, and whether Primus is real. Here, they were out of magnesium. If you don’t like copper, you can have my beryllium instead.”

“Huh.” Deadlock snorted. “Chosen of Primus, and you can’t even get the right fuel.”

“I’ll drink both of them, then,” said Optimus.

There was a clanging noise, as if Deadlock was smacking away Optimus’ hand. “No! This one’s mine!”

Rung couldn’t find the controls for his optics. Everything in his processor felt jumbled, out of place. His thoughts were slow and clumsy. He seized desperately at a stray relay and only succeeded in making his left index finger twitch.

“It was a waste of their time, anyway,” said Optimus. “I don’t know anything about the hot spot, and I certainly can’t vouch for Primus being real.”

“Frag off, of course he’s real,” snapped Deadlock. “Just because your morally bankrupt government sucked all the life out of religion and paraded its—”

“Dessicated corpse, yes, I know.” Optimus sighed. “I told them to look within their sparks, I thought you’d like that.”

Deadlock grunted. “What did you say about the cold construct bill?”

“We cannot sacrifice one future for another,” proclaimed Optimus. “We need to remember that some of our finest citizens were constructed.”

“That’s good,” said Deadlock, grudgingly.

“I thought so, until they asked for examples. I couldn’t think of anyone except you.”

“Me?” said Deadlock. “I was forged. Climbed out of a hot spot covered in mud, just like you did.”

“Oh.” Optimus sighed again. “Damn.”

“Starscream was constructed,” said Deadlock.  _ “And  _ Megatron.”

“Not great examples for the Autobot press,” said Optimus. “Especially now.”

“What about Prowl?”

“Prowl!” There was another clanging noise. Optimus slapping his knee? “I should have said Prowl.”

Rung finally triggered his optics. Light flooded in, so sudden that it was painful. His voice box clicked and whirred as it automatically tried to reset. The beeping of the spark monitor picked up, a constant, frantic ping.

“Rung?” A dark shape loomed over him, speaking in Deadlock’s voice. “Rung? Optimus, he’s awake, get Ratchet.”

Rung managed to get one of his hands around Deadlock’s wrist. “Megatron?”

“No,” said Deadlock cautiously, “it’s me? Do you remember me? I’m your assistant, Dead—”

“I was talking to Megatron,” insisted Rung. “I heard his voice. Where is he?”

“Oh.” Deadlock’s face swam into focus just in time for Rung to see his frown. “He’s in jail.”

That didn’t make sense. Rung’s optical feed glitched out for a second, and he clenched down tighter on the wrist in his grip until it righted itself again. “But I heard him. I heard his  _ voice. _ We were in a crowd, out in the countryside—”

“Oh, that was your funeral,” Deadlock said. Then he winced. “Sorry, we weren’t sure if you’d remember. You were on your comms, after we pulled you out of the coffin, but you were disoriented. Panicking. I guess Megatron called the cops and turned himself in right after you passed out again.”

Ratchet swooped in before Rung could painstakingly parse his way through that jumble of data. He elbowed Deadlock out of the way and got down to work, his grumble of commentary fading into a soothing background radiation.

Focus flickered in and out for a while after that. Rung felt Ratchet’s firm and compassionate hands, the zip of a diagnostic in his medical interface. His glasses sat oddly on his nose, and that kept distracting him until he realized they were his spare set. Deadlock must have brought them from the office, that was kind of him. By the time Ratchet was wrapping up a thorough examination of his helm and optical sensor, Rung felt steady and present enough to ask, “What do you  _ mean,  _ Megatron called the cops?”

Ratchet’s fingers on the seam of his jaw paused for a fraction of a second. There was an awkward silence. Optimus and Deadlock exchanged some kind of a look.

“Okay so…” Deadlock said, “you were murdered. Do you remember that?”

“Is it really a murder if he’s alive now?” Optimus mused.

“No processor activity,” Ratchet remarked, “no spark output registered on instruments. Medically speaking, that’s dead.”

“No, I remember,” Rung said. “There was a sniper…”

“If he was dead, he wouldn’t be functioning now,” said Optimus. “The medics must have missed something.”

“Flatline, First Aid, and three medevac units all missed something?” Ratchet snorted. “Not to mention I had my hands literally inside the hole in his helm.”

“He was resurrected through the power of the hot spot,” said Deadlock, firmly. “Death is not a permanent state of being—”

Ratchet waved a dismissive hand and ignored Deadlock’s bared teeth. “I need you to do a full transformation,” he said, leaning in closer to Rung. “Do you think you can do that for me?”

Rung took brief stock of his extremities, which were aching but only in the vague sullen way that they often did after laying in stasis for too long. He nodded slowly. “I’ll need a hand getting up…?”

Deadlock helped Rung down to the floor, where Rung shuddered through his transformation. His other mode felt odd. Almost… natural, in a way it hadn’t since the first time the functionists took him into custody. When he shifted back into root mode, it was as if something old and long-broken had finally fallen back into place.

He swayed on his weak legs, and Deadlock was there to put him back in the berth. Rung refused to be ashamed of the way he clung to Deadlock’s shoulders.

“Please,” said Rung, “why did Megatron call the police? I remember—there were all those people, but Megatron and Starscream weren’t there. That was my funeral? Why weren’t they at my funeral?”

Optimus and Deadlock exchanged another look. Ratchet busied himself with testing Rung’s range of motion.

“Don’t,” said Rung. “Whatever you’re doing, don’t. I’m  _ here,  _ I’m  _ alive,  _ I want to know what happened to my partners!”

Slowly, haltingly, they told him. 

\---

They took the train from the hospital to the jail. Deadlock sat with Rung pressed against his side, his arm around Rung’s shoulders keeping him upright. Optimus sat facing them, taking up a seat and a half of the standard cabin seating, feeling oversized and unwanted. The only reason he was even accompanying the two of them was because the justice system still required an Autobot signature to release anyone on bond before a hearing.

They didn’t talk. Rung had gone cold and quiet once he’d looked up the media reports, seen the fluid-smeared pictures of Starscream from before he’d been cleaned up, the stark list of the alleged assassin’s injuries.

“This was torture,” Rung had said. 

“He’d killed you,” said Deadlock.

“Starscream’s calling it a citizen’s arrest,” said Optimus.

“I want to make it clear,” said Ratchet, “that I do  _ not  _ support releasing you less than a day after I was at your  _ funeral—” _

But Rung had just started walking, leaning against the wall for support. Deadlock cursed and chased after him, catching Rung’s arm when he stumbled. He’d ended up carrying him most of the way to the train station, because it was that or let Rung crawl his way there. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but Rung was  _ stubborn _ . And like every medic Optimus had ever known, remarkably cavalier about his own wellbeing.

The train passed into a tunnel through the Lower Tetrahex Mall, throwing them all into shadow and sordid yellow light. Rung broke the silence first.

“Thank you,” he said, his mouth a grim line, “for coming with me, Optimus. You didn’t have to.”

Optimus tactfully didn’t mention that if he hadn’t gone, there wouldn’t have been anyone else on hand legally permitted to sign their designation to the bail bond. “You’re welcome,” he said. “I’m happy to be of assistance.”

Rung turned his head, peering through the glass into the fast rushing dark. “Was that really just my funeral?” he asked. “All those people were there just for me?”

Optimus stared at him.

“Of course they were there for you,” Deadlock said, frowning. “Who else would they be there for?”

Rung’s dark brows knit together, but all he said was, “And yet…”

It wasn’t a long walk from Gamma Station to the city jail, which was where Megatron and Starscream and the assassin were all taken after Megatron gave them up. Optimus happened to know, because people happily told him things (sometimes,  _ often _ , things he didn’t want to hear), that the trio had been arrested in a bombed-out warehouse in an abandoned city to the east, where the after-war reconstruction hadn’t even begun to touch. Tetrahex was the closest functional city with the closest functional holding facility, and so they had all been flown back here in stasis cuffs—including Getaway, who’d had to have his hand reattached first. 

The three of them made an odd little parade through the more or less empty back street. Rung never once asked to pause or slow down. It was hard to tell if Deadlock’s death grip on his waist was more to keep Rung upright or to reassure himself.

A storm coming up from the Sea of Rust last week had left a salty brown residue over the streets here, and Optimus crunched through the flakes a step ahead of Rung and Deadlock, thinking of Getaway. One of his soldiers. Made for  _ his  _ army. Never had a mentor. Never had a home. Optimus had tried to do right by his people, but so many times he’d fallen short of the mark. If he’d just done it differently—if he hadn’t been so determined to win at all costs—

Optimus didn’t sign out Getaway. The bot was still being seen to by medical, and would be for another day or two, which Optimus was relieved about to the point of guilt. If Deadlock had any thoughts about the exchange, he kept them to himself. 

The guard at the prison was so excited to meet the real life Prime that he hardly even asked about the mechs he’d brought along. Optimus shook the mech’s hand and politely observed his one violet pauldron, a war trophy from the battle of Tyger Pax, and then signed the discharge forms with the minimum of trouble.

“I mighta been worried,” the guard said, stuffing the forms into a drawer very haphazardly, “but it’s  _ you,  _ ain’t it, and you’d never let that big grey tanker get the best of you, wouldja?”

The cell they were shown to wasn’t anything complicated. Optimus looked it over with the automatic eye of someone who had been designing prisons, traps, and distractions for Megatron since before some alien species even developed the wheel, and judged it to be basically as good as tinfoil, if Megatron really wanted out.

Megatron looked up from his seat on the ground when Optimus came around the corner, his expression intent but not particularly surprised. “Optimus,” he said, in his usual way, and then—as Deadlock and Rung made their more precarious way behind, he bolted to his feet.

“Rung!” he said, at the glass in a moment. Behind him, on the lone bench, Starscream startled upright.

“Megatron,” Rung said, more warily. 

The guard unwisely opened the door and Megatron was through it, sweeping Rung up into his arms and clutching him so tightly that Optimus could hear the creaking of armor. Optimus also heard the unsteady hum of onboard weaponry, so he set a comforting hand on the guard’s shoulder.

“Could you give us a moment?” he murmured. “It’s a happy reunion, don’t worry.”

The guard shrugged and shuffled off. Rung had managed to free his arms, only to wrap them around Megatron’s neck.

“I’m still angry with you,” he said, his glasses barely concealing the glimmer of wet optics. “Don’t think this fixes anything.”

“No, of course not,” said Megatron, his face buried against Rung’s chest as if he were trying to bathe in Rung’s sparklight. “I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry?” Starscream leaned out of the cell, his wings high and his voice incredulous. “What are you  _ sorry  _ for?”

Megatron made a shushing noise, but Rung was straightening up in his arms, glaring over his shoulder.

“Running off to become a vigilante?” he suggested. “Torturing a mech to the brink of death? Missing my  _ funeral?” _

“You’re right,” said Megatron, immediately and unreservedly. Optimus had never heard him make a concession so easily. “I’m sorry.”

“We wouldn’t have missed it if that useless heap of spare parts hadn’t kept running away,” said Starscream. 

Rung stiffened in Megatron’s grip, pushing himself back from the embrace until only Megatron’s arm under his aft kept him from falling to the floor.. “If you hadn’t gone  _ chasing  _ him,” Rung corrected. 

“What  _ else  _ were we supposed to do!” Starscream snapped. “Just leave him running around loose? Do you think these incompetent Autobot enforcers could have managed  _ half  _ of what we managed in the space of a week?”

“We’ll talk about this at home,” Rung said, in possibly the chilliest voice Optimus had ever heard him use. “We  _ do  _ still have a home, don’t we? No one had it demolished while I was gone?”

“No, Rung, of course not,” Megatron said, “the apartment is fine.”

“Why are you acting like we’re the  _ bad guys!” _ Starscream demanded, wings bristling. “We avenged you! We found the mech that hurt you and we made him  _ pay!” _

“You tortured someone,” Rung said. “And you’re saying it was for me. How do you think I’m supposed to live with that? 

“It was my idea,” Megatron said, quietly, gently drawing Rung’s face back towards his own. “I was mission lead. It was a mistake.”

“Speak for yourself,” Starscream said, “I meant every bit of it, and I’d do it again! Better to be doing something  _ useful _ than standing around crying at a hole in the ground!” 

Rung whipped his head up. There was hurt on his face, even through the shield of his glasses. “I  _ am  _ going to die for good some day, Starscream. Maybe not soon, but I’m quite a lot older than both of you and Primus willing I’ll go before either of you. And  _ then  _ what will you do? Will you do this to yourself again?”

“Maybe I  _ will!”  _ Starscream shouted, his thruster leaving a scorch mark on the floor where it hit. “Maybe I’ll take the whole damn planet down with me!”

“You’re not even sorry,” Rung said, with something Optimus would have called disgust on anyone else. “You can’t even  _ pretend  _ to be sorry for my sake?”

“I burned everything for your sake!” Starscream’s voice was painful, crackling with static. “You think I’ll still be a senator after the hearing’s over? You think I’ll be allowed to even  _ live  _ on Cybertron?” 

“I didn’t ask for that,” said Rung, still in that even, dangerous tone. “Did you think that’s what I wanted, when I was gone? Did you even stop to ask yourself?”

“You were  _ dead!”  _ shrieked Starscream. “What you wanted didn’t  _ matter!” _

The cold mask that Rung had been wearing cracked, and his mouth twisted with a misery so deep, so abject, that Optimus had to look away.

“Starscream,” said Megatron, reproachfully, but Starscream shook his head.

“We should’ve killed that Autobot when we had the chance,” he said, and walked out.

Optimus chased after him, suddenly aware that if the guard tried to stop Starscream there would be yet another crime committed.

“Starscream,” he called, but Starscream was halfway down the corridor and didn’t even look around. Optimus covered the distance in a few loping strides, catching Starscream by the shoulder before he could burst out into the reception area.

“Get your hands off me!” snapped Starscream. He tried to turn his helm away, but it was too late—Optimus had already seen that he was crying.

“Starscream,” he repeated, awkwardly. “It’s—It’ll be alright. Rung’s better now. You can talk to him, you don’t have to—”

“No.” Starscream’s wings sagged. “I don’t want to talk to him, and I’m  _ not  _ going to apologize for, for  _ avenging  _ his  _ death.  _ Frag!” He had both hands over his optics now, pressing hard against his helm. He slumped against the wall, taking deep rhythmic vents in the pattern of a mech trying to avoid a panic attack.

Starscream didn’t look like himself. He was still coated in streaks of dirt and energon, white paint transfers from his… victim. The enforcers had confiscated his weaponry when he’d been taken into custody, but they’d left the ugly, bulky armor mounts in place. He couldn’t even rest properly on the wall because an empty missile launcher kept him propped forward.

Optimus didn’t know what to do for a lopsided, emotional Starscream. He always seemed so invulnerable when he bullied his way into Optimus’ office, draping himself over Optimus’ desk as he complained about the latest round of legislative edits. 

“Should I comm someone?” he asked, and immediately regretted it. He was Starscream’s friend, sort of. He didn’t need to make this someone else’s problem.

“Prowl,” said Starscream, thank Primus. “I want Prowl.”

“Okay,” Optimus said, risking life and limb to place a hand flat against Starscream’s trembling shoulder. “I’ll call Prowl.”

\---

Starscream didn’t come home that night. Rung fell asleep in Megatron’s arms, still waiting to hear the front door disengage and Starscream’s clipped, clicking steps. He woke up alone, and had a moment of panicked disorientation before he realized he was in his own berth, not a hospital, not a grave.

He could hear Megatron’s voice in the kitchen. He stumbled up out of the berth, down the hallway, and fetched up against the doorframe. Megatron was leaning against the counter, his hand pressed against his audial. Looking at his face, his mobile mouth, the strong lines of his frame, Rung could almost believe that nothing had changed.

“Yes,” said Megatron, into his comm. “Yes, he’s fine. I know. I know. It’ll be alright— Oh? Well, Optimus was right. No, stop laughing, it sounds awful. He just needs a little time—”

Rung must have made a noise, because Megatron tilted his head to look at him.

“I have to go,” he told the comm. “Yes, I’ll tell him. I hope I’ll see you soon.”

“Starscream?” asked Rung.

“Yes.” Megatron crossed the room to take Rung’s arm and guide him to the dining table, set with two brimming cubes of energon and every additive they had, even the special zirconium Megatron had bought for their last anniversary.

Rung’s tongue felt thick in his mouth. He kept thinking of Starscream as he’d been yesterday, angry, filthy, streaked with those orange highlights in a very precise hue. “What did he want you to tell me?”

“He loves you,” said Megatron.

“Fine,” said Rung, forcing down the flickering anxious joy in his spark that he still somehow felt whenever he was reminded. “But what did he  _ want  _ you to tell me?”

Megatron sighed. “That he’s not going to apologize unless you apologize first.”

This time Rung had to fight an unfamiliar surge of anger. “Fine,” he repeated, and shook a generous helping of zirconium into his fuel.

It was too sweet. Rung choked it down anyway.

Megatron was watching him intently, as if Rung might disappear if he looked away. Rung felt fragile under that gaze. He was feeling  _ so  _ many things, in such quick succession. Had dying rattled his processor loose? Had his emotional cortex grown back too large? He checked his schedule, desperate for distraction.

He had a solid block of medical tests scheduled, beginning in less than an hour. Well. At least they could confirm that everything was where it should be.

\---

It was the smell. Testing laboratories had a specific smell, all of them the same with only small variations. Medical grade solvent, anti-rust lubricant, the electric tang of overworked systems. Rung stood outside the doorway to Wheeljack’s lab, unable to move, unable to cross that threshold. 

“Rung?” Megatron said, paused a step behind him. 

Rung’s fingers twitched. This was important—for the sake of medical science—he couldn’t just  _ refuse _ to provide data for them, for his species, just because of, what? A little discomfort? Two days ago he’d been  _ dead, _ what was a little, a little—a little  _ discomfort _ in the grand scheme of…

“I’ll go in with you,” Megatron decided. 

“No,” Rung said, with a sharp shake of his head, “no, I’m fine. You don’t need to hover. I’m sure it won’t be long.”

Driven more by the need to get away from Megatron’s deeply unconvinced silence than by the desire to begin his appointment, he pushed the door open. He stepped through. The light and smell of a mechanology lab closed over him. 

He felt the impulse to kneel. He fought it back. This wasn’t going to be like that, he didn’t need to default to behavior patterns from a million years ago just because he  _ happened _ to be back in a passingly similar space. 

He reset his vocalizer. “Hello?”

“Hey!” a voice called, “You made it! Great timing, I  _ just _ got the centrifuge working again. You put one nitric acid compound in there and suddenly—anyway! You wanna step over here?”

Relief hit Rung embarrassingly hard at the sight of a proper cushioned medical berth, which Wheeljack patted invitingly before wandering off towards the bubbling beakers of fluids, not bothering to make sure Rung followed orders at all.

“Hey Ratch!” Wheeljack yelled, in the direction of an adjoining lab space, its door part-way open. “Rung’s here!”

Rung picked his way through the slapdash arrangement of the lab, a maze of tables and strange sparking equipment. Every one of the machines looked as if it had been cobbled together by hand, all the exposed green and red wires twisted together in bundles.

Ratchet and Wheeljack were apparently very good friends, going back even before they had been Autobots together during the war. Ratchet had vouched for Wheeljack without reservation when Rung had asked, which was nice because, as a Decepticon himself, Rung’s first reaction to the word  _ Wheeljack _ was to duck and cover his helm.

“I gotta tell ya,” Wheeljack said, “I am  _ jazzed  _ to get a look at you. Hot spot science is notoriously short on hard data, we’ve got no idea how the stuff really works. I’ve never even  _ heard _ of it having an effect on a full grown mech before, let alone a dead guy.”

Rung pulled himself up on the berth, crossing his legs neatly at the ankles.

“Or at least that’s the working hypothesis,” Wheeljack said, “we don’t have proof yet, anyway. Correlation does not equal causation yadda yadda, but I mean. It’s  _ suspicious,  _ right? Still, I bet it turns out to be some weird confluence of events, nothing mystic at all.” 

There was a whirr of machinery, and then Ratchet came into the lab proper, kicking the adjoining door shut behind him. 

“Try telling Drift that,” Ratchet snorted. On his way to the examination berth, he handed Wheeljack what looked like an echolocation gun.

Wheeljack immediately stripped off the outer casing, tossing the metal haphazardly into the sink. “Could be the surge in spark energy from the hot spot made a kinda jump-start connection and reignited your spark, could be the hot spot actually caused a  _ new  _ spark to grow out of your body—Perceptor is really pushing for that hypothesis, but I keep saying, if you’d grown a new spark altogether, you’d be a new person too, it’d be pretty obvious something was different about you—”

Ratchet flicked his hand, and the fingertips opened to reveal tiny pulse-readers. Each of the little round receptors pressed gently to the glass above Rung’s spark, and Ratchet cocked his head, listening to a feedback only he could perceive. 

“I don’t know why everyone is so fixated on the hot spot part of it,” Ratchet grumbled, his fingers shifting minutely on glass. “I was there, I  _ saw _ the lights coming on. Rung was online for a full klik before the hot spot even ignited.”

“No one knows how long a hot spot is actually in gestation for,” Wheeljack pointed out, but only in an absent, preoccupied way. He was digging through a cabinet for something, just the back of his helm visible. 

Ratchet’s mouth twisted into a frown. He drew back, shaking his fingertips back into their usual configuration. “I keep thinking...” he said, his gaze passing over Rung’s face with relentless scrutiny, “I never did figure out who put Rung’s head back together. Sorry Rung, but you were pretty fragged up when they pulled you off the street. I  _ know _ Deadlock didn’t authorize it. I’ve compared the crime scene stills against the morgue records, and it doesn’t match up.”

Wheeljack pulled his head back out of the cabinet. “What’re you sayin, Ratch?”

“I don’t  _ know,” _ Ratchet huffed. “They wouldn’t let Starscream into the morgue, and Megatron fragged off to do whatever the hell he was doing with Starscream pretty much as soon as he signed the release form over to Deadlock. So who put Rung’s head back together? Rung, I need you to take your glasses off.”

Rung did so reluctantly, then stiffened as Ratchet not-ungently took hold of his face and turned his head this way and that. Ratchet was looking at him, but Ratchet had stopped making optic contact with him. It was more obvious when he could see Rung’s optics so clearly. Rung tried not to show how very much he didn’t like that. 

“According to the morgue intake, the spinal strut was completely severed,” Ratchet said to Wheeljack, “and you know how tricky those relays are to fabricate. The processor had fused to the cranial casing from the heat. I know maybe four processor construction experts who could have rebuilt that slag on the fly, and two of them are in this room.”

As loathe as he was to draw attention to himself while an examination was in progress, Rung couldn’t help but voice his own suspicion. “...Pharma?”

Ratchet snorted. “If you think anyone in the hospital would have let Pharma within ten yards of your corpse, you’d be dead wrong.”

“So what, then?” Wheeljack said. 

“I don’t  _ know,” _ Ratchet repeated, sounding frustrated. He let go of Rung’s face a little too roughly. “It’s just not adding up.”

Rung held still, and tried not to think about how much he would rather be anywhere else in the world than here. Ratchet was his friend, he reminded himself. Ratchet must have been distressed by all this.

Surely Ratchet was entitled to some answers, after everything Rung’s situation had put him through. Rung felt vaguely ashamed to have been such an inconvenience, and for nothing, really. All that wasted grief, and yet here he was after all, perfectly fine, not a cog out of place.  _ Better  _ even, maybe, than he had been before.

Ratchet twisted the head of an adaptor onto a thick data cable. “You been to see your therapist yet?”

Rung startled, his gaze snapping away from where it had been fixed on the black-jacketed girth of the data cable. “Er,” he said, “no, I haven’t had time. My schedule is back to back with appointments for the next several days. Perceptor also wants to look at my data, to say nothing of the researchers at the medical college…”

Ratchet made a neutral sound. “Just make sure you give her a call at some point, when you have time.”

“...Yes,” Rung said, fixing his optics on the far wall, “when I have time.”

After a battery of system checks, radiation readings, and UV analysis that felt as if it took a lifetime but really only took a fraction of the day, Rung finally allowed Megatron to extract him from the lab. In the lobby, his conjunx paused for a moment and looked him over, his hands enveloping Rung’s smaller, not-quite-trembling hands. 

“I’ll go hail us a transport,” Megatron said, frowning at whatever cypher he read in Rung’s expression. “You shouldn’t be hiking up and down the city right now.”

Rung didn’t have the energy to argue. He stood in the lobby for a few moments, resenting himself, until Megatron pinged him from the roadside to let him know the transport had been secured. Then he pulled himself together, located the exit, and pushed out through it and straight into a veritable wall of mechs. All of them began at once shoving and pushing and chattering at the sight of him. There were shouted questions that he couldn’t quite hear, the flash of lights driving away the shadows.

_ Reporters.  _ Rung stopped dead, staring into his own dread-filled face reflected back in the live-feed mirror, a myriad of little red recording lights blinking at him from the crowd of media mechs.

For a moment, Rung felt the instinctive urge to turn to Starscream. But Starscream wasn’t here, and this wasn’t one of his impromptu press conferences. The front-most camera surged forward as Rung took an unsteady step back.

“Rung of the Pious Pools!” a reporter shouted, microphone extended in hand. “Do you have any insight into the nature of your miraculous resurrection?”

“I,” Rung said.

“What was it like being dead, doctor?” another reporter asked, elbowing his competition physically out of the way. “Did you see Primus? The Guiding Hand? Is there an afterlife, doctor?”

Rung’s back hit the closed doors of the building, coolant rushing through his lines so loudly that it nearly drowned out the chatter of the crowd. “I,” he said, “I can’t—I’m sorry—”

“Was it medical or mystical?” another reporter demanded. “What does Wheeljack have to say?”

Rung’s frantic gaze finally fixed on the shape of Megatron, coming around the corner of the building. He shot up an arm, stood on the tips of his feet, and waved, trying to conceal his utter desperation. There was only a fraction of a second of narrowed red optics before Megatron came marching through the press of press and scooped Rung up against him, tucking him tight against a growling engine. 

“That is  _ enough,” _ Megatron said. His whole hand closed around Rung’s helm, pressing his conjunx’s face into the corner of his chest kibble. The world became a dark echo and a stifling heat, and then they were off, the rest of Cybertron moving invisibly around Rung.

In the hot cage of Megatron’s fingers, Rung choked off a dismal noise. He offlined his optics and clenched his fists against Megatron’s vents, wondering what the hell was wrong with him. He was alive. He was alive after all, and shouldn’t that be good enough?

“Scavengers,” snarled Megatron. “Hunting after any little bolt or scrap of gossip.” His voice softened as he eased Rung into the transport. “You’re fine? No one hurt you?”

“Yes,” said Rung. “I mean, no. I mean—of course I’m fine. I just don’t like being news.”

\---

In a sand-blasted wasteland, at the frontier edge of the galaxy, Tarantulas (née Mesothulas) bred lilacs from the dead earth. 

Sand ground in the chiton of his joints and in the ragged seams of his grey traveling cloak. He longed to return to their home base, on a little watery planet a dozen systems over, where the laboratory facilities were complete and the scenery wasn’t so dismally repetitive. That planet was teeming with life, bright and small and delightfully vicious, cannibals and parasites, each handful of dust containing a wonderful new terror. But they’d be done here soon, once the materials were decontaminated and properly stowed for travel.

He pushed open the door to the makeshift lab tucked into the stone of the desert, shaking off the grit as best he could. Where was Ostaros? He left the child for a moment, and—ah.

“Don’t fuss with the corpse,” Tarantulas called out, hoisting his portable workshop back onto his primary shoulders. “It’s probably not healthy to expose your developing circuitry to that kind of radiation, though I admit I haven’t done any tests.”

Ostaros, reluctantly, climbed down from the slab and rushed to get underfoot instead. Tarantulas gently scruffed him with one spider leg and deposited his adventurous creation into the crux of his one spare root-arm. His laboratory on this planet was haphazard, thrown together from spare parts and fortuitous natural architecture, and the radiation shielding had been the first thing he skimped on. The work was difficult, hunting Decepticon stragglers out here in the boondocks of the galaxy, but it was the best way to get spare parts and metallico for his rapidly growing progeny. Especially now that the war was done. A good war could cover a  _ multitude  _ of sins.

The workcase he deposited on the slab, and Ostaros he deposited on the counter top next to the subspace transmitter. His creation immediately pulled the transmitter into his lap and started fiddling with the receiver settings, kicking his chunky legs, wings folded back and fluttering aimlessly against the counter.

Luckily for their little family, there were always a few anti-social veterans and radicals lingering on frontier planets and seedy bars, willing to walk into a strange ship for the promise of a few fast shanix. Ever since building this new hybrid body, with its warm blood and scrambled signatures, most of the Cybertronian vagrants of the frontier didn’t even recognize him as their kin. It was remarkably easy to play the ignorant and unsuspecting organic for all of them, at least long enough to lure them into his lovely little laboratory crypt.

Ostaros let out a squeak of delight. “Signal!” he said, “There’s a signal!”

Tarantulas hummed, in the middle of cracking open the Decepticon’s substantial blue chassis. This one was technically still alive, although only barely, and not for long.

“Can I play it?” Ostaros asked, holding up the transmitter. When Tarantulas nodded, absently, his progeny turned on the video feed. 

“—Exclusive footage of the amazing undead mech exiting a laboratory run by infamous Autobot scientist  _ Wheeljack. _ Medical researchers and mechanico-scientists are all desperately trying to figure out how this mystical feat of resurrection was accomplished, although no one has been available for comment at this time—”

Tarantulas paused, crowbar wedged into the spark casing of the unlucky Decepticon radical on his slab. He sidled over to the transmitter, where the broadcast was throwing up the image of an exhausted-looking orange Cybertronian, alt-mode absolutely inscrutable. 

The video ended, and the announcer switched to a still image of the bot in question, slowly revolving, his mouth frozen in an uncomfortably tight line. It looked like a government record, although not recognizably a mug shot. As it turned, his serial number was just barely visible.

Tarantulas narrowed his optical visor at the image. 

“If you haven’t seen it already, take a look at this footage of the Bismuth Field hot spot igniting—you can see the corpse, here, and—”

The rhythm of his fuel pump lurched and leapt—the fabric of the cosmos unfolded to reveal gorgeous particles of truth. Tarantulas gently lifted the transmitter from Ostaros’ hands, and marveled at the multitudes it contained.

“What is it, Papa?” Ostaros asked, down-folded wings flicking. “Do you know him? Is he a friend of yours?”

Tarantulas’ brilliant mind was alight with visions. “Not yet,” he murmured. His claws traced the edges of the device reverently.

What could he do for Ostaros with science like  _ that? _ To crack the mystical truth of their species right down the center, like a geode, unfolding all that had once been hidden? He nearly salivated at the thought.

“You know,” he said, “I  _ did _ tell you someday I would take you to meet your father. Would you like to do that now?”

Ostaros jolted upright. “Yes!” he said, “Yes, I want to meet him!”

“Well then, we will simply have to make a trip,” Tarantulas said. “It really  _ has  _ been too long.”

He set aside the transmitter, which had moved on to some humdrum news regarding a senator in disgrace.

“Come now, my little monster,” he said, hefting Ostaros onto his hip, “I think it’s time you were introduced to your home world.”

The body could wait. Tarantulas had travel plans to arrange. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you liked this chapter, you can share it on [Tumblr](https://neveralarch.tumblr.com/post/622667834358628352/apotheosis-chapter-2-desdemonakaylose), [twitter](https://twitter.com/neveralarch/status/1279210750473646087), or [DW](https://neveralarch.dreamwidth.org/107668.html). Or leave us a comment!


	3. That Would be the Proof of Life When I Am Gone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So what's Tarantulas up to, anyways?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings for this chapter: more of Rung's medical trauma, choking/emetophobia, brief violence, Tarantulas in general. If you need details, ask us.

Jazz was living the good life. He had to remember that. He had a nice apartment, a good group of friends, and a gorgeous new conjunx. They’d just had the party a week before all the slag hit the fan, they were practically still on their honeymoon.

No reason to resent his conjunx’s amica, currently sprawled on their couch with his optics glued to a little pocket vidscreen.

Jazz leaned on the doorframe, trying to summon the air of casual threat that had come so easily to him back in wartime. “So,” he said, “you, uh, you thinking about crashing here a while?”

Starscream didn’t answer. The screen was showing a live mark-up session for the cold construction bill, which Starscream would’ve been in the thick of if he wasn’t currently out on bond after taking a mech half to pieces.

“There is no longer a need,” said Senator Metalhawk’s tinny voice, “to _construct_ newsparks. We have a new, natural wellspring of them right outside the city! We can avert the social conflicts that led to the horrific civil war, and begin anew! No one forced into frames they don’t fit, no one grappling with the trauma of being mass-produced—"

“Yeah, sounds great, that’s fragging _exactly_ what we proposed for the sparks we already _have,”_ said Senator Rattrap. “Did anyone read the bill, or did you all go starry-eyed from the lightshow?”

“The bill,” said Senator Dai Atlas, “is outdated. Some parts of it might be useful—this structure for recruiting and monitoring mentors, for instance. But surely we cannot prioritize manufactured sparks over a gift from Pri—"

Starscream’s mouth twisted and Jazz ducked for cover as the vidscreen went flying. It hit the wall a few feet away from Jazz and fell to the ground, screen cracked and flickering.

Jazz carefully lowered his arms from where they’d been shielding his head. “Not having a good day, huh?”

Starscream glared, sullen and silent. Jazz hadn’t ever seen Starscream this persistently uncommunicative—usually the mech talked nonstop, filling the apartment with gossip, complaints and boasting whenever he came to see Prowl. But this time Starscream didn’t even bother with an insult. He just turned away, curling sideways to lie on the couch with his wings facing the room.

A few seconds later, Jazz’s sensors started picking up comm traffic. He didn’t have to check the recipient’s signal against his database—it was Megatron again, just like it had been all day yesterday and the evening before that. Jazz watched Starscream’s wings for a few minutes, but they didn’t do anything particularly interesting.

Prowl was in the kitchen. Jazz went over and grabbed a stool.

“You picked a real winner for an amica,” he announced.

Prowl frowned. He was using a scale for energon flavorings again, even though Jazz kept telling him no one could actually taste the difference between five micrograms and six. 

“You think he’s gonna eat any of that?” Jazz kicked his heels against the stool’s legs. “He didn’t have more of a sip from the last three cubes.”

“I’ll inject it if I have to,” said Prowl. “Stop fussing. Starscream is well within his expected range of behavior.”

“Oh, so you expected that he’d come and mope on our couch after his partner came back from the dead.” Jazz snorted. “You’re good, babe, but you’re not that good.”

“I expected Rung’s values to inevitably clash with Starscream’s,” corrected Prowl. Ugh, it was unfair how much Jazz liked it when Prowl’s tone went all clipped and precise like that. 

“What would you do if I was assassinated?” asked Prowl.

“They’d never find the perp’s body,” said Jazz, absently, watching Prowl’s mouth.

Prowl nodded. “What do you think I would do, if I lost you to violence?”

“Now, that would depend on the situation.” Jazz shifted his gaze down to Prowl’s clever hands, stirring a precisely-measured dose of silver into one cube. “I know you’d do whatever you thought best.”

“And it doesn’t bother you?” asked Prowl. “That I might not avenge your death?”

Jazz felt a small pang in his spark, but it was easy to ignore. “Nah. I’d be dead, you can do what you like.”

Prowl nodded, as if he had expected Jazz to say that, and picked up the still-fizzing cube. He gave the mixture a critical once-over, apparently found it satisfactory, and turned to the living room. As Prowl made his way out of the kitchen, fuel in hand, Jazz let his smile slide off his face.

No sense flirting with Prowl when he was busy with an amica unexpectedly out of mourning and sad about it. He’d take a drive instead. Stretch his wheels. Maybe when he came back the place wouldn’t feel so tight and sour against his sensors.

\---

The transport drone was somehow both massive and cramped. Rung felt like he was rattling in his seat, but every time he shifted he found himself pressed against Megatron’s hunched frame. He could only see out of the windows if he strained.

It was a long drive to Ultihex. They’d left from the lab nearly as soon as Rung had arrived, Wheeljack in particularly high spirits as he and Ratchet gathered up the last of their survey kits.

“Ratchet keeps telling me you came online first and the hot spot came after,” Wheeljack had said, shrugging as he shoved a tripod into a carrying case, “so let’s test _your_ effect on something _else_ this time! Who knows, maybe you’re the catalyst!”

Rung didn’t feel much like a catalyst. He felt thick with anxiousness, formless and pervasive. He wished that he could rewind back a week or two, to when things had been less complicated and much happier and Megatron would _talk_ to him instead of sitting at his side staring at him like a love-stricken bodyguard of some Primal fairy tale. 

Rung opened his mouth to say something to this effect, then swallowed it as they hit a bump that made the equipment in the drone’s storage rattle. He bobbed up in his seat instead, watching Wheeljack swerving excitedly in counterpoint to Ratchet’s steady pace.

“The Hallowed Delta!” Wheeljack said, once they arrived, hopping out of alt and onto his pedes with a splash and splurch of wet silica. Ratchet pulled up a moment behind, idling his engine doubtfully.

Rung hung back, pedes on the runnerboard of the transport, and considered the unfamiliar terrain with trepidation.

“This is where _I_ was sparked,” Wheeljack said, proudly, gesturing at the swampy river mouth below like a proud patriot. “Outta seventy-four full term sparks, I’m the only one without an aquatic alt. Had a couple beastformers in the cohort actually, fish or salamanders or something, I forget.”

“No offense, Wheeljack, but it’s a real dump. It’s practically a breeding ground for a—" Ratchet accidentally put his pede through a patch of muddy ice, “...Rust infection….”

“Maybe they were lobsters,” Wheeljack said, squinting into the distant bay. “Mighta been lobsters.”

The whole transport rocked on its treads as Megatron disembarked, swaying and creaking. He circled the back and then came to stop beside Rung, considering the ground.

“I’ll carry you,” he said, and offered a hand, flat palm out. 

Rung stiffened. “Don’t be silly. I’ll have to touch the ground eventually, if I’m going to test this hypothesis.” 

Megatron didn’t say anything, but his hand didn’t retract. He simply stood there, somehow both deferential and implacable, until Rung sighed and allowed himself to be gathered into Megatron’s arms.

Megatron seemed determined to treat him like a delicate, fragile treasure. Rung supposed he couldn’t blame him. How would Rung have reacted, if he had to look at Megatron or Starscream with their heads broken open on a slab?

Well. He would have gone to their funeral, for a start.

“There’s some solid ground up here,” said Wheeljack. “Nice central location. We’ll be able to see the whole place light up!”

“Nothing’s gonna happen,” said Ratchet, trying vainly to shake sludge off his foot. “The place is already spent. We should be back in the lab, looking at the samples from the active hot spot.”

“Aw, it’s good to get out.” Wheeljack stamped on a little hill of minerals, first cautiously and then with more vigor. “Perfect, right here.”

Megatron carefully set Rung on the hill and then stepped back. Standing free and independent, Rung fought the urge to hug himself. He felt chilly and oddly weak. Still recovering, Ratchet kept telling him. Recovering from what? 

The minerals felt inert and pleasantly solid under Rung’s feet. He took a breath through his vents and let it out.

Nothing happened.

“What a waste of time,” grumbled Ratchet.

“Hey, come on, give it a minute,” said Wheeljack. “You were at the last hot spot for what, fifteen minutes before anything interesting happened?”

 _Interesting._ Was that what they were calling it? Rung shifted from foot to foot, trying not to think of all of those people who’d been there for the funeral—for the spectacle.

Megatron cleared his voicebox with a little buzz of static. “I’m sorry, I need to take a call. Will you—"

“Fine,” said Rung. “Fine, I’ll be fine.”

He didn’t miss the look Megatron gave him, nor the way that Megatron kept him in his clear line of sight even as he retreated out of hearing.

“So,” said Wheeljack, “how’s Starscream taking the, uhh, everything?”

“I really don’t know,” said Rung, stiffly. “He’s with his amica.”

“Oh.” Wheeljack’s fins flashed awkwardly, but he ignored the shushing motions that Ratchet clearly thought Rung couldn’t see. 

“I was just wondering,” said Wheeljack, “what he thinks about the whole hot spot thing? Because we were working pretty hard on the whole ‘compassionate construction’ idea, and I know a big selling point was that we didn’t have any sparks coming out of the ground anyway.”

“We haven’t discussed it.” In fact, Rung hadn’t spoken to Starscream since the fight at the jail. Megatron, on the other hand, seemed to be talking to him constantly. Rung glared sullenly at Megatron’s shape, watching him pace in the distance as he spoke into his comm.

He’d always wanted Starscream and Megatron to bond properly, hadn’t he? For his partners to take comfort in each other, rely on each other? It had only taken this, apparently. All of this.

His tank churned uncomfortably.

“You should ask him about it sometime,” said Wheeljack, as if he was willfully mistaking Rung’s meaning. “Starscream’s got a pretty good grasp of spark development, for a politician. Seems real happy tinkering in a lab. He built me this wacky energon distiller—"

“Stop,” hissed Rung. “I don’t want to talk about Starscream.”

“Rung?” Ratchet sounded worried. “Are you all right?”

“No! No, I am not alright.” Rung barely refrained from stomping his foot. He’d look ridiculous. He _was_ ridiculous. “I’m sick of these _tests,_ and _experiments,_ and _polite conversation._ I want to go back home!”

Megatron was starting back toward them, his mouth contorted with concern. Rung fought down the urge to gag.

Unsuccessfully.

There was a hot thickness at the back of his throat, a choking thing, like a medical tube or an emotion. Rung clasped his hand around his throat and brought the other up to his mouth, a sickly shudder running down his back. He convulsed, throat working in silent desperation, curling into himself. The blockage tore free, and he spit it into his shaking palm.

A perfect four-sided crystal, clear as quartz, wet with hydraulic fluid from some rupture deep in his throat.

“What?” he said, hoarse and barely above a murmur. 

Ratchet already had his hands on him, scanners buzzing into life. Wheeljack was prying the crystal out of Rung’s hand.

Megatron was there, the comforting, familiar bulk of him looming over Rung. “What’s going on?” he demanded.

Rung coughed up another crystal, this one a smooth oblong oval.

“Ratchet,” growled Megatron.

“Rung, you’re experiencing a power surge,” said Ratchet. “I need you to try and disengage your systems from whatever they’re trying to do, can you do that for me?”

Rung offlined his optics and tried to find whatever was wrong with him. There was an unfamiliar process taking up three quarters of his CPU, and he—

He choked—

“Primus’ flying bumper,” said Wheeljack, his voice hushed with awe. “Rung, you’ve done it again.”

Rung onlined his optics to a wash of holy light.

\---

Prowl opened the front door with the wary curiosity of someone who had received many death threats and very few visitors over the course of his eventful life. He was a private mech, not usually pleased to invite either friends or strangers into his private space the way Jazz once had been. Fortunately Jazz seemed less inclined to host these days, no doubt out of deference to Prowl’s sensibilities.

If it hadn’t been for the fact that Jazz never rang the buzzer on his own home, Prowl would have thought it was only his conjunx, back surprisingly early from his drive. But Jazz would only have come home early if there was an emergency, and even then he would have commed ahead.

It might, he thought, be some copycat assassin here to finish the job on Starscream. But if that was the case, opening or not opening the door would make little difference to any weaponry salvaged during the nominal disarmament of the war. They had all gotten much too good at simply blowing buildings away, by the end of active combat.

Prowl opened the door with a light touch and slipped out past the threshold only to find himself facing empty air. He reset his optics, scanning infrared, ultraviolet, and sonic frequencies. Nothing.

There was a slight tug on the edge of his hip plating.

His down-shifting gaze finally landed on a diminutive figure, not quite a mech and not quite an organic, barely more than knee-high on a frame of Prowl’s specs. Brilliant green panels hung from its back, more like propeller blades than jet wings, trailing the ground at their dusty tips.

It blinked up at him with unusually large blue optics, or possibly eyes. “Are you Prowl?”

Prowl conceded that he was.

The small person’s mouth split in an unnervingly wide smile. “I’m supposed to stay with you! You’re my dad!”

“I’m not familiar with that concept,” said Prowl, “but I doubt I am anything of yours. Who told you that you were staying here? Are you one of Jazz’s friends?”

“A dad’s like a mentor but better!” chirped the person. “I was grown from your CNA!”

Prowl’s processor sputtered as he tried to fit this information into any of his three hundred and seven working models of the world. The small person seemed to take his silence as an invitation to duck around his legs and make its way into the apartment.

“Is this where you live?” it asked. “Wow, you have paintings!”

“Keep it down out there,” snapped Starscream, from the living room. “I’m on the comm!”

Prowl trailed after the person as it darted into the living room.

“Wings!” it yelped, optics shining with excitement. “You have wings! Like me!”

Starscream raised his helm from where he’d been resting it on the arm of the couch. “Dearest,” he said into his comm, his tone cut with acid, “I have to go. There’s a mutated minibot here to see me.”

The person stuck out its tongue. “I’m Ostaros, and I’m _not_ a minibot, I’m still _growing,_ and someday I’m gonna be as big and as pretty as Prowl because I was grown from his CNA!”

Prowl looked helplessly at Starscream. Starscream clicked off his comm and narrowed his optics at the—at Ostaros.

“You were grown? Who grew you?”

“My papa,” said Ostaros, proudly. “Tarantulas!”

Starscream gave Prowl an inquiring look.

“No,” said Prowl. “I have no idea who that is.”

“How did they get your CNA…?” Starscream said, scrutinizing at the small person who’d moved on to investigating Jazz’s entertainment system.

“Very carefully, I assume,” Prowl said.

Back behind the speaker system, Ostaros had shoved his little hand into the box where Jazz kept his (dusty, unused) electro-sitar, and was rooting around, glossa pinned between his lips. There was a dull twang like the dead strings were being tugged at. Prowl had a vague sense that Jazz would not appreciate this.

Should he alert someone? But who...? No crime was being committed, and Ostaros didn’t seem troubled at all. Prowl thought it likely that reporting an abandoned sentient to the small, overburdened social services department would only result in the problem being delegated to the nearest responsible Autobot—i.e. Prowl. 

“Papa says I can’t come along even though I’ve got lab safety training,” Ostaros said, nonsensically. “So I have to be good and listen to you, because you’re my dad, and he’ll be back for me once he’s finished vivi, vivectitating god. Do you have any movies? Do you like Rambotron? I have _all_ his movies, even the one that was banned for showing the inside of a real life spinal column. Papa got me a bootleg off a ‘con we met at Alpha Centauri.”

Prowl hesitated, eyeing the shattered husk of the mini screen Starscream had vented his frustrations on earlier. Ostaros was an unanticipated variable. His nature was opaque, his existence was worrying, and his creator—whoever that might be—apparently felt entitled to Prowl’s nursery services as _well_ as his deep schematics.

But—he thought, watching Starscream watching Ostaros, pulled up from his slump on the couch for the first time in days—unmapped variables could have their uses as well, under certain circumstances.

“Jazz might have a film you would like…” he said, and reached for the case of their data library.

\---

After the hot spot came tests, after the tests came mandatory berth-rest, and after _that_ Rung arrived at the hospital, ready to work. Doubtless administrative tasks had piled up in his absence—unanswered correspondences with donors, supply chain problems, escalated MR department queries—and he’d spent far too long already sulking in his oddly quiet home, accomplishing nothing. Megatron hovered behind him, as was his usual lately, like a persistent storm cloud.

In the elevator, Megatron had glared at the other medics until they broke down and got off on the next available floor, shaken. Rung tamped down the urge to ask Megatron what he thought he was doing, treating Rung’s staff that way. It was like being back in the midst of the war, in that oppressive hierarchy of whims.

No sooner had the elevator touched down on his floor than Rung pushed into the front room of his own office, Megatron at his back, moving perhaps a touch faster than someone whose steps weren’t being dogged might move. 

“Rung!” Deadlock said, jolting upright at his desk where he’d been sorting piles of hardcopy complaint forms. “What are you doing here?”

Rung actually retreated a step, so taken aback at the lukewarm reception. “I’m—I work here? You didn’t _replace_ me while I was gone. I hope.”

For a second Deadlock just stared at him. Rung felt a dread well up within him, sticky and dark. He’d barely been dead a week! Surely they hadn’t, surely he wasn’t _that_ —

“No!” Deadlock said, “What? No! It’s just that, here, look at your calendar, you’re on medical leave for the next week and a half.” Deadlock turned the screen of his computer towards Rung, indicating a row of bright blue blocks on Rung’s own calendar. 

Rung reached out and pushed the screen back around with one finger tip. “That’s not going to be necessary. I’m fine. Better than new, frankly. I’m sorry to have worried everyone—”

“Rung,” Deadlock said, “you were _dead.”_

Rung waved him off. “I’m not dead _now,_ though, am I? And I’m ready to work. I know how much Ratchet hates paperwork, I’m sure it’s been building up. And I’m more than a week late for my conference with the House of Ambus, which I’m sure Minimus in particular has some strong words for me about.” He paused. “Ah, hmm. Split participle. I’ll have to keep an eye on that.”

Deadlock shook his head. “Boss, you were _dead._ The fact that you’re here at all talking to me is a mercy from Mortilus. Don’t take it so lightly.”

“It’s _fine,”_ Rung said. “I’m _fine_ , and I want to work.”

Deadlock scooped up an armful of what Rung had taken to be complaint forms. “Rung, your existence is _cosmic._ I’ve got letters on top of letters asking me to explain what it means, and I don’t know what to tell them! I was _there_ and I don’t know what to tell them!”

“You can tell them what I’m telling you,” Rung said, “which is—” He didn’t know how to finish that sentence. What was he?

“I’m just a normal mech,” he decided. “And I belong here, where I can be useful.”

He stepped forward, but Deadlock sidestepped and slid in front of the door to Rung’s office. He tilted up his chin, looking both defiant and a little despairing. “I’m not letting you in here until Ratchet clears you.”

There was a heavy weight on Rung’s shoulder. “Deadlock is only looking out for your wellbeing,” Megatron said, “it’s his job to take care of you.”

“No,” Rung snapped, “it’s his job to answer calls, not to be your _petsitter!”_

Deadlock looked wounded, but Megatron’s expression of stony deference didn’t change. Rung felt that constricting burning bubbling up inside him again, and he swallowed, hoping he wouldn’t start choking up crystals in the middle of his office.

“You ought to rest before the next set of tests,” said Megatron, calmly.

“I’m not doing any more tests,” spat Rung.

“Fine,” said Megatron. “In that case, let me comm Ratchet—"

Rung had to fight an unfamiliar and disturbing urge to hit Megatron. It was _awful_ and anyway he wouldn’t be able to reach anything unarmored, but—

“Don’t you _care?”_ he demanded. “Don’t you have any emotions besides dumb relief? Did you mourn me at all while I was gone, or did you just throw yourself into goading Starscream to violence? You’re not even here with me, you’re always on the comm with Starscream, you’re just following me around because you’re worried I might—"

“Die,” said Megatron. “I’m worried you’ll die, because you did already. Because we still don’t know what’s _wrong_ with you! You’ve set off two hot spots, and your spark is apparently generating crystals, and you were _dead,_ Rung, do you think I didn’t mourn when I saw you laid out in the morgue?”

His voice had risen and risen as he spoke, until he was only a micron away from shouting. Rung glared up in defiance, his spark sickly thrilling at _finally_ some show of feeling.

“You weren’t at my funeral,” he said.

“If I’d had my way,” growled Megatron, “there wouldn’t have even been a funeral.”

Rung’s vision went red. There was screaming, most of it his, most of it incoherent. At the end of it, Megatron was storming out into the corridor and Deadlock had his arms wrapped around Rung’s chest, holding him back from following.

Rung dug his round fingertips into the arms around his waist, longing for claws.

“There’s oil,” said Deadlock. “Streaming out of your optics. Is that normal?”

Rung touched his face and looked at the sticky black fluid that came away on his fingertips. He suddenly didn’t feel strong enough to stand. “No,” he said. “Probably not.”

Deadlock guided him into one of the visitor’s chairs. “You know he didn’t mean it like that, about the funeral. He just—"

“Yes.” Rung was exhausted, all the way from his processor to his struts. “Yes, I know.” 

Deadlock reached out, hesitant, and wiped another drip of black oil from Rung’s overheated cheek. He looked down at his fingers as if unsure what to do with the fluid now. 

“Can I stay here?” Rung asked. He let his helm fall back against the wall. “Just until I have to go to my testing.”

“I thought,” Deadlock said, and then stopped himself. “Sure. Let me just get you something to clean your face.”

\---

Jazz enjoyed his drives. He’d used to feel happiest in a crowd, but nowadays it was off-road racing that did it for him. Fewer people to track. Just him and the burn of dirt under his tires. It reminded him a little of the calm he’d feel after completing a mission, when the energon was cooling on his hands and the extraction plan was clear in his processor. 

The calm lasted all of twenty seconds after he opened the door and was greeted by an uncharacteristically harried Prowl and a weird insecticon-looking thing trying to climb up Starscream’s leg.

“Sorry, babe,” said Jazz, once explanations had been provided and knives put away. “I don’t know anything about kids.” 

The apartment looked as if it had been gently chewed on and spit back out. Most of the storage was in disarray across the floor, where Jazz had to carefully pick his way around it or risk shattering the data disks he’d picked up on Antari while he was tracking that one counteragent. There was red confectionary dust everywhere, in the shape of suspiciously small fingerprints.

“What did your caretakers do when you were in the crèche?” pressed Prowl. “Starscream and I don’t have _any_ experience. At least you _were_ a juvenile.”

“Yeah, uh,” Jazz rubbed the back of his neck. “I wasn’t, that’s the thing. It never really came up? But I was constructed.”

“What?” yelped Starscream. 

“Star, Star,” Ostaros slapped at Starscream’s hip, all the way up on his odd clawed toes so he could reach. “Can I have another rust stick? Staaaaar?”

“Never came up?” Starscream’s optics were narrow slits as he handed the kid the whole packet. “You’re listed as forged in three separate Autobot databanks.”

“You shouldn’t have access to those, that’s private information,” said Jazz. “Anyway, you know how it was. Is. It’s just easier if people think you were forged. I spent three days working at the docks I was built for, and that was three days too many. I didn’t need anyone thinking about sending me back there.”

“What’s forged?” asked Ostaros, around the seven rust sticks he’d stuffed in his mouth.

“Forged,” said Starscream, “is when you get everything handed to you the second you pop out of the ground and idiots like Dai Atlas call you a gift from Primus.”

“Aw, come on, you’re gonna confuse the kid,” said Jazz. “Forged just means that your spark grows in the ground and then imprints on living metal, which becomes naturally shaped to match the frequency of your spark. And then everyone cheers and you get bundled off to a crèche to be coddled and trained for a while until you grow up into an adult that can be put to work.”

“Oh! Like from the hot spots!” Ostaros beamed, his face now a mess of red streaks. “Papa thought those were amazing.”

“Ostaros,” said Prowl, “is your papa—"

But Starscream was already fuming. _“Everyone_ thinks they’re amazing. As if we didn’t already have a way to construct new Cybertronians! Just because they won’t be covered in muck when they get into their frames—"

Jazz snorted. “You’re fighting a losing battle, Screamer. All of those crusty old moralists in the senate were ready to bite their tongues and restart the factories when they thought it was the only option, but now they got the opportunity to grow some adorable, malleable, naive little tykes instead of dealing with brand-new adults, they’re gonna—"

“Factories?” asked Ostaros.

“Cold construction,” Prowl explained, “is a process by which an artificially-created spark is placed in a complete adult frame. All of us, apparently, were constructed.”

“Huh.” Ostaros ran a wet finger through the empty bag of rust sticks, collecting crumbs. “It sounds weird. Which one turns into soup?”

Jazz couldn’t be hearing this right. _“Soup?”_

“Yeah, you know! The part where you go into a cocoon and then you melt into goo for a couple months and then when you come out you’re bigger and cooler and your wings don’t bang on the ground anymore! Papa says if I get enough slurry I can have a _third_ mode, I was thinking about a tank, like Rambotron, but maybe I’ll be a car instead. Like Prowl!”

 _“Slurry?”_ repeated Jazz. What the frag had been done to Prowl’s CNA, to get something like this?

“Ostaros,” said Prowl, “who _is_ your papa?”

“Tarantulas!” Ostaros said the name with both fondness and awe. “He’s the greatest and the smartest and the nicest, and his fur is really soft and he hugs me really tight! He’s got a bunch of arms and optics and sometimes he gets real small but he can also be real big, and he can make webs, and—"

“And he’s going to vivisect god,” said Starscream, wearily. “Whatever that means.”

\---

Tarantulas scuttled into the lobby of the research facility, having just moments ago manually locked the door to the main laboratory where a young up-and-coming scientist (bless him) was running late putting his materials together for a battery of tests he would never have the opportunity to administer. Well, perhaps _after_ Tarantulas was finished with the subject. Perhaps. Tarantulas didn’t concern himself with the _after,_ generally speaking. It seemed so unwise to make plans when you didn’t know what would be left of a subject.

In his hand, he had a medical chart on a pad with a transparent back. This was absolutely essential: a mech with a clipboard could go nearly anywhere he liked. Dear, mad Shockwave had taught him that, back when he’d been the mech’s student.

The subject looked up from his folded hands, as if startled. He seemed a very small thing in person, but his smallness was only in _part_ a question of the physical—his tucked-in chin, his tucked-in shoulders, his legs neatly crossed at the ankles—even his very spark radiation seemed muted.

“I’ll be your medical evaluator today,” Tarantulas said. “We’ll be going off-site to a testing facility set up specifically for you. Won’t that be delightful?”

Rung’s expression bordered on despair.

“Mm, not a fan of travel I see,” Tarantulas said. “Well, I’ve secured us a nice little transport, so don’t fret, we won’t have to walk the whole way. I’m much more sympathetic to the travel problem now that I have legs myself, instead of wheels.”

Rung gave him a second look, now, some amount of interest lightening his demeanor. “You weren’t always a beastformer?”

Tarantulas clacked his mandibles with delight. “Oh, certainly not! This little body is all my own design, top to bottom. I’ve met an absolutely titillating variety of alien fauna in my travels, some of it _so_ inspiring. On this rainy water-planet, at the edge of the galaxy, I encountered these wonderful arachnids…”

He reached out and curled his various arms loosely around Rung’s back, herding him out of his chair and towards the building’s back exit. The mech followed without much handling needed, allowing himself to be guided out into the loading bay behind the building and down towards the stolen transport.

“Gorgeous, self-sustaining little things,” Tarantulas said, “most of them so small you or I could only make them out with a microscope. But the bigger ones—! Oh, I hadn’t felt so inspired since I lost my darling.”

“You lost an endura?” Rung asked, trying to twist to look behind himself as he was being nudged down the bay steps. “The war took him from you?”

“Oh no,” Tarantulas said, “the war brought us together! But, like waves upon the shore, what fate brings together, fate often tears asunder.”

The transport was a little oversized for a mech of Rung’s stature. Rung contemplated Tarantulas’ outstretched leg for a moment before accepting the handhold. “What a depressing thought,” he said. He pulled himself up into the transport and allowed Tarantulas to neatly close him inside.

“I don’t think of it as depressing,” Tarantulas mused. It was enjoyable _to_ muse, to have an adult mind to speak to who wasn’t yet occupied with screaming. “Destiny is holistic. If I hadn’t been pulled into the war, then I never would have had the opportunity to create my Ostaros. And if I hadn’t been pushed away again, we never would have ended up on that rainy little planet at the edge of the spiral. And now here I am, Tarantulas at last, the most myself I’ve ever been. All things are unfolding as they should.”

As they rumbled off to their destination, Tarantulas shrunk himself down a bit, just enough to get more comfortable in the space. His new body had so many bits and bobs, and more mass than his self as Mesothulas had ever had. Tarantulas delighted in the complexities, but transport seats weren’t really designed with him in mind.

Rung closed his arms around himself. “What were you doing out there?” he asked. “Once you’d been ‘pushed away,’ I mean. I’m sorry, I’m having a little trouble following you.”

Tarantulas tapped the hooks of his claws together thoughtfully. “I was running from the war, I suppose. Or rather, from the end of it. I was all alone during my… service. I lived underneath the surface of an Autobot-held planet, working on my experiments, offering them up for the satisfaction of my beloved. When the word came that a truce was being negotiated—I wasn’t meant to know, I don't think. There were soldiers coming to clean out my laboratory, grunts you understand, no imagination. They would have ruined my magnum opus before I could finish, and I couldn’t bear the thought of it. I was so in love, and I knew I would never see him again if I fled, but it was him or the child.”

“Child!” Rung said, and snapped upright. “A sparkling?”

Tarantulas leaned over a bit, crowding Rung against the transport’s door. “I’ll tell you something _secret,_ if you promise not to tell!” But he couldn’t help himself, and before Rung had even started to reply, he burst out: “I constructed a sparkling!”

Rung’s mouth popped open. “You constructed a… you mean a juvenile Cybertronian, a protoform?”

Tarantulas cackled, wriggling happily in his seat. “They said it couldn’t be done! But once I worked out how to make a synthetic spark, I discovered that fresh sparks are incredibly malleable—give them the raw material and they form sentio metallico from the very ether! It’s fascinating! Of course I had originally planned to construct him a body, in the usual way—it was when I had to make my escape, bringing only what I could carry, that I discovered the peculiar qualities of the nascent spark. In that moment,” he sighed happily, “everything changed.”

“You grew him… a whole new body?”

“Well,” Tarantulas said, modestly, “most of one. Some of the pieces did need manufacture. But still, how amazing! How unprecedented! Think of the possibilities, the ability to construct hot!”

“Yes,” said Rung, distantly. “The political debates would be even more complicated.”

Tarantulas tutted. “You’re thinking much too small. Standard Cybertronian self repair can barely handle an infection of _rust!_ We aren’t a species that’s meant to heal, we’re a species that’s meant to be _fixed!_ ” Tarantulas brushed a paw down the length of his body, highlighting the best features of his work. “But these techno-organic bodies can grow, and change! They can heal, they can metamorphose! Like you, Rang! You show us all how Cybertronians _should_ be!”

“Please, it’s Rung,” said Rung. “I don’t—I don’t think anyone would want to be like me.”

“Nonsense,” said Tarantulas. “You come back from the dead, you create life with your mere presence. We should all aspire to such glory.”

Rung sighed and slumped into his fist, leant up against the narrow window of the transport. 

For a moment, silence reigned in the transport. Tarantulas could hear the pavement underneath them giving way to sand. It wouldn’t be long now.

He fished out a spark-output register from his voluminous subspace and tapped it a couple times, until it flared to life. Might as well get some passive readings while they had a moment—the more data he had to start with, the easier it would be to contextualize his more intensive observations.

“Do you like being a parent?” Rung asked, almost painfully earnest.

“It’s the greatest joy of my life,” Tarantulas answered, immediately. “I thought once that I might take a conjunx, you know. Make my darling an honest mech. Back then I thought he was the most important person in the world, that I would do anything for him. But now that I have Ostaros, I can’t imagine anything more important. I would alter the revolutions of the galaxy for him.”

Rung gave him a watery smile. “I always wondered about becoming a mentor,” he said, “but it just never seemed like the right time. And who would want a nobody with an unglamorous alt to introduce them to society? I’d embarrass any newframe the moment we left the crèche. And now—”

“Now you have the ability to ignite scores of new life in a single day!” Tarantulas said, patting Rung’s arm possessively and then picking it up to get a better look at his mechanisms. “Incredible! Unprecedented! You probably won’t be able to keep the kids off you with a stick!”

“I’ve always been a no-one,” Rung said, his gaze now over Tarantulas’ head, fixed on the far window as Tarantulas played with the cables of his wrist. Being examined was likely unremarkable to him now, after the last week (and who knew how much longer) of exacting anatomical tests. “Even as the conjunx of Megatron, I’ve hardly shown myself to be memorable. I don’t know how to deal with myself as a public figure. I don’t know what people want from me.”

“Difficult,” said Tarantulas. The transport slowed to a stop. “But I _do_ know what _I_ want from you. Ready to do those tests?”

\---

There really were a lot of letters. Deadlock had them filed into ‘serious scientific inquiry,’ ‘serious metaphysical inquiry,’ ‘concerned citizen,’ and ‘whackjob.’ The whackjob pile was threatening to tip over and overwhelm the rest of the desk.

Ratchet comming was a welcome distraction.

“Hey, babe,” said Ratchet, “is Rung with you? He didn’t show up to his appointment with Brainstorm.”

Deadlock jerked up into attention. “He went to that two hours ago.”

“Frag,” said Ratchet. “He’s not answering his comms—I thought he just bailed, you said he was kinda upset? And Brainstorm was late to the appointment, kid got lost and managed to lock himself in a room or something—"

Deadlock grabbed the blaster he’d stored under his desk after the funeral-that-wasn’t. “Yeah,” he said, ”I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding. Let me ask around.”

\---

Megatron bolted up from where he’d been sitting in the audience of the darkened, empty theater. “No,” he said. “No, he hasn’t commed me.”

“Okay,” said Deadlock. “Don’t do anything rash, but—"

“Yes,” said Megatron, ”I understand completely.”

\---

They were watching Rambotron. Ostaros and Starscream on the couch, Jazz and Prowl still talking quietly in the kitchen. Starscream didn’t hate it, surprisingly. Ostaros didn’t make demands or judge him. He was perfectly happy just eating rust sticks and watching Rambotron beat a mech to death with another mech’s severed head.

“Aren’t you too young for these kinds of movies?” asked Starscream. “I mean, you’re not going to be an adult for—"

 _“Years,”_ whined Ostaros. “Papa says it takes a long time to collect enough base materials.”

What a weird system. Starscream was used to thinking of his stolen childhood in terms of the few weeks he could’ve spent trundling around and building the perfect frame instead of trying to learn how to walk and maintain military formation at the same time. If he’d had years to build himself—well. He understood why Ostaros was aiming for a triple changer.

His comm pinged. Starscream sent a busy signal.

Megatron’s voice filled his audials anyway. “Rung’s gone missing.”

“Star?” said Ostaros. “Why are you clawing the couch like that?”

“Stop panicking,” said Megatron. “We can find him. I put a tracker on his frame after his resurrection, and I’m sending you the coordinates because you can get to him the fastest. But you are _not_ to do anything without my—"

\---

There was a crash and then the faint tinkling of glass. Jazz made it to the living room first, but only because he vaulted over Prowl. 

Ostaros was sitting on the couch with his knees hugged to his chest, staring at the broken window.

“Hey, kiddo,” said Jazz, gently. “You okay?”

“Uhuh,” mumbled Ostaros. “Starscream can fly, right? He’s okay? He didn’t fall, right?”

“He’s fine,” said Prowl, his fingers pressed to his audial as he listened to his comm. “His partner Rung’s just been kidnapped, and he’s gone to rescue him. Yes, Starscream, I understand the need for urgency. You could’ve taken the stairs up to the roof.” 

“That’s a funny name,” said Ostaros, starting to relax. “Like the guy in the news, huh?”

“Yes, he was in the news,” said Prowl. “Starscream, I’m calling enforcer units. Do _not_ do anything more than what’s necessary to ensure Rung’s safety. Starscream? Are you listening to me?”

“That’s why we came back to Cybertron,” said Ostaros. “Papa saw the hot spots coming back, and the mech on the news said it was a miracle sent by Primus, and Papa said that if _that_ was true, then he wanted to find Primus and open him up to see what made him work.”

Pieces started clicking together in Jazz’s head. Weird, absurd, _very bad_ pieces.

“Sweetspark,” he said to Prowl, “do you know any deranged scientists?”

“He hung up on me,” growled Prowl. “What? Yes, of course. The army was full of them.”

“A deranged scientist who would grow a kid from your CNA, _and_ decide Rung was a god, _and_ decide to cut him open?”

“Oh,” said Prowl. “Mesothulas.”

\---

Dusk had fallen during the ride across town, down into the derelict section where Rung’s examiner of the day had apparently set up shop. _Free real estate,_ Tarantulas had explained cheerfully, _less likely to ruffle feathers out here, away from other people’s labs._

Rung, thinking of Wheeljack’s perpetually unhappy, soot-blasted neighbors, understood the sentiment.

The lab was a bit chilly and poorly lit, although perhaps Tarantulas with his plethora of optics didn’t require extensive lighting. Rung avoided looking too closely at the toolcases set out along the hastily dusted countertops; they would only push his low level anxiety into unmanageable levels. 

“Don’t mind the mess!” Tarantulas called, “I hardly had time to set up, I was so excited to get to you. You’re going to do amazing things for my research!”

Rung sighed. “At least one of us is excited, then.”

“You aren’t excited? You’re about to revolutionize mechanology! Your body is the key to arcane truth, the occult and the divine! The source of life itself; the genesis of the soul, such as it may be.” There was a rattle and a clank from the other side of the room. “My dear mech, you are an apotheosis unfolding!”

Rung wasn’t sure what to say to that. The sentiment felt oddly akin to a compliment, but it seemed crass for Rung to say _thank you._ It wasn’t as if he’d actually done anything. 

“Have you visited the little ones?” Tarantulas asked. “Any of the newsparks? The fast growers ought to be coming out of the ground in protoforms by now, by my calculation.”

“Oh,” Rung said. He turned away, towards the lone, deep set window. “No. No, I haven’t.”

“Oops!” The jingling sound resembled a box full of loose utensils accidentally knocked over. “Why so?” 

Rung fixed his gaze on the dark window. He’d heard that a nursery was being hastily rebuilt for the harvest; he’d been asked a few times if he wanted to go back out to the Bismuth Field, or to see the natal ward going up around the last semi-functional Lighthouse in the hemisphere. He always said no.

“So many lives,” Rung murmured, watching his face reflected in the night-shadowed glass. “To bring even a single Cybertronian into the world—to bring so many of them, to be _responsible_ for that—what if they don’t want to be born? What if they hate me for what I’ve done?”

“They won’t know if they don’t get to try it,” Tarantulas said, cheerfully. “Will you pop your spark chamber, Rang?”

“It’s Rung,” Rung said, absently.

He climbed up on the medical berth, familiar by now with the routine, and obliged. The glass slid open, a naked feeling that Rung had become familiarized to again over this last relentless round of testing. He looked away while Tarantulas poked around at his insides, tuning out with hard won practice the rootless dread that rose within him. Just another wringer to be run through, and then he could go home again. 

Tarantulas began lecturing, as he started his work, with the eccentric enthusiasm of a wayward academic. “Since the beginning of history, you know, sentient species have worshiped the genesis of life,” he remarked. “Individuals connected to that genesis are idolized, objects fetishized—a history of divinity written in the birthrate of a species. What are Primes, really, but repositories for the ultimate fertility relic? But you—you don’t need an intermediary, or a talisman! You _are_ the talisman, the source of the source itself!”

There was an uncomfortable pinch somewhere in Rung’s open chest, and then Tarantulas took his paw back out, empty. 

“Divinity has never yet been _mapped,_ never _interrogated_. The science of previous eras tossed it to the corner and let religion dissemble its parts, but the division of religion and philosophy and science is an artificial one. You do see, don’t you?”

The scientist skittered back to his laid out array of tools along the counter. Rung felt heavy, too tired to keep up with the constant motion. He let himself slump back on the berth and resigned himself to another endless night of staring at a cracked ceiling.

“Deadlock has been telling me—” Rung cut himself off and started over, “my assistant, sorry, my assistant has been telling me that this is all… cosmic. _Divine,_ I suppose. But I’ve never had much truck with gods. When I’ve looked, nothing has been there. I’ve been fighting all my life on the edge of Cybertron’s suffering, and I’ve never seen anything or anyone reach down to help.”

Tarantulas hummed. _“You_ were there, though, weren’t you.”

Rung frowned. “That isn’t really the kind of intervention I was talking about.”

There was a flash in Rung’s peripheral vision. Like something held up in Tarantulas’ hand, turned over in the dim overhead light. _“I_ think we’re all gods in our own ways,” Tarantulas said. “Masters of our own fates. Creators of our own designs. Our sphere of influence waxes or wanes based on what measures we’re willing to take.”

“That’s a very philosophical position,” Rung said.

“Oh, I meant it literally,” Tarantulas said. There was another flash, and then a soft clink of something being set down. “Now, we are not a carnivorous species, so the idea is somewhat foreign to us, but among quite a few heterotrophic species there is this _fascinating_ supposition that consuming power imbues the consumer with that power. The thread contains a certain logic. When we cannibalize a part from the frame of another mech, do we not gain the power of that mech?”

“I’m sorry,” Rung said, shifting uncomfortably—or at least trying to, his exhaustion was so deep—on his berth. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”

“That was the grand mistake of the Functionists.” Tarantulas was turned away from Rung, his form melting into shadow. “They thought they could prune back creation, tend to it as you might a crystal topiary. But when you discard part of something, you lose its power. You lose the knowledge. They spent a long time studying you, didn’t they?”

“Yes,” said Rung. It was all in his file. “Too long.”

Tarantulas hummed. “If they knew what you were, they would have never let you go.”

Rung wanted to rub his face, but he couldn’t move his arm. “I’m,” he said, and then he had to clear his vocalizer and start again. “Something’s wrong. I can’t move.”

“Oh,” Tarantulas said, and suddenly he was at Rung’s side again, optics bright and mandibles chittering. “You’re going into stasis! I clipped a field generator to the inside of your chassis just now.”

The floor dropped out of Rung’s tank. Dread choked in his throat like the beginning of a crystal growth. “What— _why?”_

Tarantulas twirled a few of his arms nonchalantly. “Most people have trouble sitting still while their cranial casing is removed. It’s nothing personal, I’m sure you’re a model patient. It’s just simpler this way.”

“R-removed?” 

“Oh yes,” Tarantulas said. “I’m _so_ excited to get my hands on it! I’m sure your OS is something astonishing! Like a fossil trapped in amber—to look at the very root of all Cybertronian life! What fortunate times to live in!”

Rung’s body responded as if it _was_ trapped in something, infinitely heavy and slow, his engine screaming in his chassis as he struggled just to lift his shoulders. The need to _move_ itched and clawed at his actuators, his neck strained with the effort to lift his head—and then there was nothing, no response at all, and he collapsed that hard fought fraction of an inch back onto the berth.

“You’ll kill me,” Rung whispered. 

Tarantulas nodded agreeably. “That’s certainly possible! I am not a medic. And I’m not all that good at keeping things alive. But who knows! You’re made of sterner stuff than the average mechanism. And don’t worry, it’s for a very good cause! My darling Ostaros deserves only the best materials for his moult. What better than the programming of a legend?”

“Please,” Rung said, “don’t do this. Let me up. You can still get your readings, I’ll help you, I’ll give you whatever you want, just—just take the generator out—”

“Sorry,” Tarantulas said, examining the inside of a tube shaped implement briefly before tossing it aside. “I would offer to knock you out, but I need you awake enough to scream if I hit the wrong cranial relay. It’s delicate business.”

Every nightmare of a cold laboratory and medical berth, straps and instruments, boiled up inside of Rung. He turned his head as much as he could manage and spit a jagged crystal onto the slab.Tarantulas perked up at the _ping_ against metal, immediately collecting it and examining the shape.

“Fascinating,” he said, “A photonic crystal. I wish I had had a couple of _you_ around when I was synthesizing Ostaros’s spark!”

Rung coughed again, hydraulic fluid spattering over the berth and his cheek. “Please,” he said. “You’re doing this for Ostaros, aren’t you? Would he want you to kill another person just to improve his frame? Is that what you want his life to be built from? Murder?”

Tarantulas hefted a black, sturdy box onto the table beside the berth, and popped open the lid, spilling cool fog into the air. Rung could not help but notice that the dimensions were almost perfect for the size of an average Cybertronian brain module.

“I’m sure he’ll understand,” Tarantulas said, easily. “After all, he’s understood about all the other mechs I’ve cannibalized to make him. Why should one god be any different?”

“One—" Rung coughed. “One _what?”_

“You really don’t know what you are, do you?” Tarantulas asked, with apparently genuine interest. 

“I’m a doctor,” Rung said, his voice weak and scratchy. “I’m a healer. I help people.”

“Hmm.” Tarantulas lifted Rung’s arm, limp as a doll, and stretched it out, tracing the small black letters of the serial code with the hook of one paw. “But what are you _for_ , do you think?”

“I’m not _for_ anything,” Rung snapped. “Is that what you want to hear? I’ve driven away everyone I love because I’m _difficult_ and confused and _miserable_ and there’s nobody left who needs or wants me now except for _testing._ I can’t even work! I’m nothing! I’m just a nonsense body doing nonsense things, just a—a glitching functionless scrapheap.” 

Tarantulas tisked at him, tucking Rung’s arm back neatly against his body. “That wasn’t what I meant at all! Come now, don’t be so small-minded. Haven’t you ever noticed that you’re serial number one of one million? Haven’t you considered that _means_ something?”

“It’s number one million,” Rung corrected, “of one million. It’s _old,_ but it’s not _meaningful.”_

“Ah ah ah.” Tarantulas wiggled his paw at Rung. “You’re reading it backwards! You’re the _first,_ my modest little friend. The very first of the very first one million ever born. You’re so very caught up in the minutia that you’ve missed the grand unfolding revelation!”

“I,” Rung said. “No. You’re mistaken.”

Tarantulas cackled, swept up his box of horrors, and spun with it clutched tight to his chest. “We have a _word_ for the progenitor of the species,” he said, “we have a _word_ for a body that can grow new life inside of it! What word is that? Go on, three guesses and the first two don’t count!”

“...Primus,” Rung said, and felt the world dance uneasily around him. 

“Primus!” Tarantulas agreed.

Rung reset his swimming optics, but it did nothing to stop the dizzy feeling in his head. The name settled heavy on his tongue, like a loadstone falling into place—the idea locked into his processor and a thousand fragmented memories realigned themselves, sensations, impulses, longings—the weight of history swallowed him whole, in horror and in awe.

He’d forgotten so much, over the many long years. He didn’t remember his own forging. But was it really possible that he’d forgotten this?

Rung’s helm pounded. After a moment, he realized that was because Tarantulas was trying to hammer a crowbar into a transformation seam.

“Please,” said Rung.

Tarantulas hummed a cheerful little song and ignored him.

“Please,” repeated Rung. “You can’t—not when I’m only now realizing that I—"

Tarantulas silenced him with a particularly hard blow to the crowbar.

Rung resigned himself to pain. He was used to it. Lying on a medical slab and being tortured was almost second nature. At least Tarantulas didn’t seem inclined to drag it out.

If only he’d bent to his partners instead of pushing them away. His stubbornness would literally be the death of him. Would it have been so hard to hide his emotions, to be more patient, to be forgiving? Now there was no one left who would search for him, who would even notice if he was gone.

There was a click, inside Rung’s audial, and then three sharp pings from a frequency he knew intimately. His optics widened.

 _Brace yourself_ , the message came through, toneless and terse, and then the deep-set glass of the window crashed inward, scattering glittering chunks across the floor. From the mess, in a heap of hot pink plating and rage, Starscream unfolded from alt and whirled on Tarantulas.

Tarantulas blinked his many optics in a cascade of green lights. He paused, hand on the crowbar wedged into Rung’s helm.

“Ah, hello there,” Tarantulas said, “this is… exactly what it looks like, actually, could you hold off a moment? Won’t be a klik here.”

There was a brief, perfect silence, and then Starscream launched himself at Tarantulas, claws first, howling.

They hit the floor in a mess of legs, Tarantulas with a yelp of alarm. A toolbox full of little silver horrors crashed and spilled across the floor, screws and chisels and knives. No matter how Tarantulas pushed at Starscream’s comparatively light body with all his limbs, he could not seem to pry the seeker off. Starscream shrugged off awkward blows and dug into Tarantulas’ unarmored frame with claws and elbows and knees, until all at once Tarantulas froze, legs twitching, optics bright.

The wicked tip of an armor-carving knife, snatched from the floor, glinted against the side of Tarantulas’ head.

“I don’t know where the spark is in this atrocity of a body,” Starscream hissed, “but I promise you, this is a head injury you will _not_ have the chance to recover from.”

Tarantulas said nothing, possibly because Starscream’s other hand was crushing the scientist’s voice box with his full weight. 

“Starscream!” Rung said, “What are you _doing_ here?”

Starscream’s wing flicked, but his attention never strayed from the body pinned underneath him. “What does it _look_ like?” 

“It looks like you’re rescuing me.” Rung hesitated. “Are you rescuing me?”

“Of course I’m rescuing you! What the frag else would I be doing in this rust trap?” 

“...But why?”

Starscream’s wings hiked up. “Perhaps you’d prefer I kept my nose out of it? Maybe you’d rather me just let you _die. Again._ Maybe that would assuage your relentless martyr complex?”

“No, I,” Rung swallowed down an automatic retort and said, instead, honestly: “I’ve never been more relieved or grateful to see anyone.”

Starscream was silent for a long moment, and in the room there was only the static sound of Tarantulas’ crushed voice box in Starscream’s grip.

“Please don’t kill him,” Rung said, softly.

Starscream jolted, and then he gave Tarantulas a sudden ruthless punch to the front of the helm with the hilt of the knife, enough to disorient even a mech who did _not_ have several extra optics arrayed up there. While the scientist was reeling, Starscream twisted round and gave Rung the most scathing look he’d ever received.

“You’re _joking,”_ Starscream said. “I caught this tacky mockery of an organic with a crowbar wedged into your helm, and you want me to let him _go?”_

“Well, _ideally_ law enforcement would be involved,” Rung said. 

“Why is everything I do _wrong_ to you?” Starscream demanded, one arm shooting out seamlessly to grab a recovering Tarantulas by the throat and slam him back against the floor. “I’m not the bad guy! I’m the _good_ guy! Any sane person would be grateful that I’m taking out the trash who threatened them!” 

Rung _ached_ to be able to get up. To touch Starscream, to pull him close and talk softly into his neck. But his strength seemed to be drained away, leaving him cold except for an odd heavy heat in his core. He worked his jaw, fighting for the energy to speak. “I’m _grateful_ to be rescued,” he said at last. “I’m _afraid_ you’ll hurt another person. There is a difference, do you see?”

“ _He_ hurt you! That Autobot sniper hurt you too! These people keep hurting you and I can’t do anything to stop them without you acting like I’m some kind of psychopathic killing machine!”

“Starscream,” Rung said, softly but urgently, “he has a _child._ A dependant. Someone who loves him, who will suffer when he’s gone. If you kill him for my sake, in _my_ name, then I become the reason for that juvenile’s grief.”

“So what?” Starscream snapped. “If he killed you, it’d be _me_ grieving, and he wouldn’t give a damn about it!”

“Starscream,” Rung said. “I love you.”

There was a moment of wet silence, while Starscream blinked away some emotion and turned back to the beastformer currently wheezing in his grasp.

“I love you, and I’m sorry if my anger made you feel unloved. My life must mean something to you, or you wouldn’t be here now—but your life means something to _me.”_

Rung’s spark twisted—ached—with profound and growing pressure.

“When I die, I want you to _remember_ me. I don’t want vengeance and I don’t want you to destroy yourself for my sake. I want you to be happy, and think of me, and to think of my memory as a blessing. That’s what I want, and if you respect me as much as I desperately want to believe you do, you will treat my wishes as if they matter.”

By the last word, Rung felt as if he were wringing every syllable out like water from a stone. His optics flickered. His heat index had begun to climb, though he still felt icy cold.

“Do you?” he managed. “Do you understand?”

The layering of tubes and chiton creaked under Starscream’s squeezing hand.

“If you understand,” Rung said, “you’ll let him live.”

Starscream’s free hand flexed, the tips of his wicked claws shining against the hilt of the poised knife. 

“I have faith in you,” Rung said. His optics flickered again, and then died, swallowing the laboratory in perfect night. “Let that be enough.”

\---

The building was old and derelict. Jazz would’ve said it was entirely abandoned, if it wasn’t for the clear trail of weird-looking footprints leading to the door. Plus the fresh broken edges of glass in one of the large upper windows. And then there was that faintly chemical smell…

“Starscream’s already in there?” asked Jazz. It felt way too quiet for that to be true.

“This is where his tracker is, anyway,” said Prowl. “It hasn’t moved for twelve and a half minutes.”

“Did you _tell_ him you stuck a tracker under his armor?” asked Jazz.

“He knows it’s there,” said Prowl, which didn’t answer the question.

Ostaros tugged at Jazz’s hand. He was looking pretty worn out by all the excitement, even though he’d ridden here in Jazz’s alt. It had felt a little uncomfortable, having a squirmy technorganic clone in his front seat, especially when Ostaros started playing with the steering wheel.

“You need something, kiddo?” asked Jazz.

“Is Star okay?” asked Ostaros. “Did he find his ring?”

“His Rung,” corrected Jazz. “I dunno, kid, we’re about to find out.”

Prowl drew his stun blaster and put his shoulder to the door. “On three,” he said, quietly. “One, two—"

Jazz put his hand over Ostaros’ optics. He wished they could’ve left the kid with someone else—this was his creator, after all, and Starscream seemed liable to make a mess.

“Three,” said Prowl, and shoved the door open.

Jazz edged forward even as Ostaros clawed at his arm.

“I wanna see!”

“It’s gonna be gross,” said Jazz, thoughtlessly.

Ostaros fought harder. “I don’t care about _gross,_ I’m not a _baby._ Papa dissects people in front of me all the time!”

“Yeah, that sounds bad,” said Jazz. “Prowl, hon, is it—"

“Clear,” said Prowl. There was a click as he holstered the blaster again.

Jazz came in with his hand still clamped over Ostaros’ optics, but there wasn’t any energon splattered up the walls or limbs strewn around. It was just a semi-functional lab space with Starscream and Rung curled up on the one medical slab together, and some freaky furry monster lying on the ground a few feet away with no less than four sets of stasis cuffs slapped on his wrists and—tentacles? Were those tentacles?

Ostaros pushed at Jazz’s hand again, and this time Jazz let him go.

He stared around wildly for less than half a second, then spotted the monster. “Papa!” he shrieked, and ran straight for it.

 _“That’s_ Tarantulas?” asked Jazz. “Mesothulas? Whoever?”

“I suppose,” said Prowl. He was bending over the slab, running a hand gently over Starscream’s wing. “Starscream? Is Rung all right?”

Starscream curled closer around Rung. “He won’t wake up.”

“His spark is still spinning,” said Prowl, with a hand over Rung’s chest. “It’s spinning fast, actually.”

“Papa!” yelled Ostaros, tugging at Tarantulas’ mandibles. “Papa, Papa, Papa, you _gotta_ wake up, Prowl’s here!”

One of Tarantulas’ optics glowed. “Prowl? Oh, hello Ostaros, my darling. Did you have a good time with daddy?”

“Why are you tied up?” Ostaros asked Tarantulas.

“He stuck a _crowbar_ in Rung’s _head!”_ yelled Starscream. “Get _off,_ Prowl.”

“You need to let go,” said Prowl, implacably prying at Starscream’s arm. “We need to slow Rung’s spark or he might—"

“Oh,” said Ostaros. “That’s Primus? He looks small to be Primus.”

“That’s who your pops thinks is Primus,” said Jazz. “He’s just a fussy little mech who was near the hot spot when it went off, that’s all.”

Tarantulas cackled. “A fussy little mech? You have no imagination. Are you Prowl’s assistant?”

“His conjunx,” said Jazz, vindictively. “Jazz. Nice to meet you.”

Tarantulas went silent.

“Jazz is cool!” chirped Ostaros. “He’s got _tons_ of movies and games and he showed me how to whistle, you wanna see?”

“Starscream,” said Prowl, “let me help.”

Starscream looked down at Rung, his expression pinched and desperate. There was an ominous high-pitched noise that Jazz eventually identified as Ostaros trying to whistle.

Rung didn’t look _good_ , but he sure didn’t look dead either. There was something about him, a kind of brightness to his body, that Jazz didn’t much like. His helm _was_ a little scratched up; Tarantulas probably _had_ tried to pry it open at some point. Maybe he didn’t have the medical codes to override that transformation. Jazz took a step closer to the slab, unable to resist the lure of curiosity. He’d about driven himself crazy wondering what Rung’s deal was over the years, and even if it was probably nothing, part of him wanted to see the nothing for himself.

He stopped abruptly in his tracks at the sound of clanging outside the lab, muffled but growing speedily louder.

There was a crash as the door burst in, revealing Optimus Prime and _Deadlock_ of all people, shoulder to shoulder, blasters sweeping the room. Jazz relaxed and raised his hands in welcome as well as caution.

“Hey, mechs,” said Jazz. “It’s all wrapped up, except for Rung’s maybe a god and definitely unconscious.”

Ratchet shoved his way out from behind Optimus and Deadlock and then practically shoved Starscream off the slab in his determination to get at Rung. Sure, why not. They probably needed a medic here anyhow.

“God?” said Deadlock.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Ratchet, unspooling his medical cable. “There’s no such thing.”

Deadlock planted his hands on his hips, still-live blaster and all. “Ratchet, you’re _fragging_ Optimus _Prime.”_

Jazz whirled to give him the full blast of an incredulous stare, and noticed Prowl and Starscream doing the same from where Prowl was hugging/restraining Starscream. Deadlock’s biolights flushed.

“Please,” said Tarantulas. “There’s a child present.”

“I’m just saying,” Deadlock mumbled. “You don’t get to be an atheist when—"

“I’m agnostic,” said Optimus, in the tones of someone who’d had this argument many, many times.

“So _close-minded,”_ sighed Tarantulas. “Do you never wonder where we came from? We do not evolve unaided, like organics. We create _ourselves.”_ He rubbed his face against Ostaros’ cheek. “I wanted his source code for you, darling. I would’ve made you more perfect than anyone could ever imagine.”

A look came over Prowl, just then—a sort of reserved, cool recognition, like he’d finally found something that resonated familiar in the whole bizarre totality of whatever _Tarantulas_ was. But then those dark mute thoughts were jarred by Starscream jolting in his arms, and both their attentions fell on the medical berth where Ratchet had frozen in alarm.

There was a clank and a _clunk,_ and then Rung contorted into alt mode on the slab.

“What did you do?” shrieked Starscream.

“I didn’t do anything!” Ratchet shouted back. “He just—"

Jazz hadn’t seen Rung’s alt mode before. He’d got the sense that it was a sore subject, from the little time he’d spent prodding at it. He looked like… a tube? Some kind of tool? An ornament, maybe, like it was listed in his official paperwork. Whatever it was, it was humming.

“Rung,” said Starscream, fighting out of Prowl’s grip and half-flying to Rung’s side. “Rung, Rung, _please,_ I did what you wanted, please just—"

The round sparkglass of the object flared, and there was a wash of blue light, sending every detail of the room into stark relief. Jazz felt for a moment as if he was outside of his own frame, as if he was looking at a tableau. Starscream with his hands on Rung, trying to fend Ratchet off. Deadlock and Optimus standing too close, Optimus’ hand on Deadlock’s shoulder. Ostaros still buried in Tarantulas’ fur. Prowl, as stoic and calculating as ever, his optics briefly meeting Jazz’s before they flicked back to Rung.

There was a groaning noise. It built slowly from an irritating whine to a strut-shaking rumble, until Jazz had to grab a bit of wall to stay upright. The sparkglass _opened,_ peeled back like a launch bay roof, and an object spat out, ricocheting off the ceiling and landing in an empty patch of floor near the entrance.

The light faded. Rung abruptly flipped back into root mode, where he was immediately gathered up into Starscream’s arms again.

“What,” said Jazz, “the _pit—"_

“Language,” said Tarantulas. “Really, Prowl, was this hellion the best you could do for a rebound?”

“Rebound?” said Prowl. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“After the unfortunate dissolution of our budding romance,” clarified Tarantulas.

“We were co-workers,” said Prowl.

“We flirted all the time!” said Tarantulas. “I’d build you some horrifying death machine, and you’d say ‘brilliant as usual, Mesothulas,’ and I’d think about how beautiful and calculating you were, and then—"

“—And then you stole my CNA,” said Prowl.

“You say that as if it was a crime,” said Tarantulas.

“It _was_ a crime—"

There was a clanging noise as Deadlock dropped to his knees. He had his hands over his mouth, the blaster discarded on the floor. Jazz thought he could hear him whispering a prayer behind his fingers.

“Stop,” Starscream hissed at Ratchet, still clutching Rung like he might die if he let go. “Stop, stop, you’re not _helping,_ you’re—"

“He just lost a tenth of his mass!” said Ratchet, who had managed to get his hands on Rung’s wrist and started opening the medical port. “Optimus, get over here and restrain Starscream.”

“Um,” said Optimus.

The door burst in again, this time breaking a hinge and banging off the wall, as if it had been kicked in by someone who was so excited to kick a door in that they had forgotten to check whether the door was locked or not. A squad of Autobots tumbled into the room, in something approaching military formation, and then froze as they took in the whole spectacle in quick succession. 

“Oh,” said the lead enforcer, a flashy young mech Jazz recognized from spec ops, “oh, okay. Well this seems. Crowded. Wow, is this like… all of high command? From both factions?”

“We only got a couple of the Decepticons,” said Jazz. “Thank Primus.”

That word felt odd on his tongue. Nah. It couldn’t be, right? Sure, Rung was spooky, his very existence threatening to slide out of Jazz’s mind every time he looked away. But a fragging _god?_

The enforcer sketched a salute at practically everyone in the room. “I’m sorry,” he said, “we got reports of a kidnapping?”

“It’s resolved,” said Prowl, and gestured at Tarantulas. “If you could just collect this mech?”

“No!” yelped Ostaros. “No! Papa’s not going anywhere, are you, Papa?”

“Hush, darling,” said Tarantulas. “It’ll only be for a little while. There isn’t a prison in the galaxy that could keep me from you.”

“Uhh, okay, that’s worrying,” said the enforcer. He turned to his squad. “Bluestreak, Smokescreen, you take statements. Rubble, guard the guy in cuffs. Everyone else fan out, start tagging evidence. Does the little orange dude need to go to the hospital or something?”

“He’s fine,” said Ratchet, who currently had his hand over Starscream’s face, physically holding him back as he took Rung’s readings. “Weirdly, completely fine. Just unconscious.”

“Cool,” said the enforcer. “Hey, what’s this?”

It was the thing that had come out of Rung, kinda round with a bit of a glow to it, sitting innocently in the dusty corner. It had a lingering, electric field that fuzzed up when pedes approached it. 

“Hey,” said Jazz, “be careful with that.”

The enforcer snorted. “I’m always careful. Look, I’m getting out my special evidence bag, I’m nudging it oh so gently with my foot to make sure it won’t explode—"

There was a flash of light when the enforcer touched the thing. The same blue light that had filled the room when Rung made it, and it _burned_ this time, like Jazz’s spark wasn’t sure if it could take the pressure. His sensory squite glitched. When reality lurched back into focus, the enforcer was down on his knees, screaming as his plates cracked open—everything was clean pure light and tumbling mechanisms, sections of the young mech’s body trying to tear themselves free of his frame.

Optimus moved, Jazz darted forward, and then it was both of them holding the enforcer up before he could keel over entirely. The blue light was gone, the thing was gone, and the enforcer was at least a head and shoulders taller than he had been. Jazz staggered as the weight shifted in his arms. Frag, he was heavy now.

“Fascinating,” Tarantulas remarked. “It took me decades to rebuild myself. I suppose I should have just come home and asked Primus nicely, hmm?”

“What’s going on?” mumbled the enforcer. “My chest feels weird.”

“Hurts?” asked Optimus.

“No,” said the enforcer. “No, it—it feels _good…”_

Rung jerked upright on the slab, his optics blazing. Ratchet startled back from the berth, the cable connecting him to Rung pulling taut. Starscream reached out to almost-but-not-quite touch Rung with one trembling hand.

It wasn’t quite as if Rung had woken up. The little mech seemed animated by something outside of himself, a livewire of something powerful and unsettling, stiff bodied and strangely weightless.

 _“Arise,”_ intoned Rung. “Arise, Rodimus Prime.”

The enforcer—Rodimus?—jumped like he was on strings. “Oh Primus,” he said. “Oh _frag,_ oh _Primus—"_

“Hey,” said another enforcer, over by the door. “You can’t come in here, there’s an ongoing incident—"

Suddenly he was flying through the air, his frame hitting the opposite wall with a heavy thunk of reinforced armor and a yelp. The body that barreled through the door was Megatron’s, his blaster in hand, with Soundwave and fully thirty other ‘cons at his back. For a klik, bemused, Jazz was transported back to the infamous conjunxing ceremony years before. His hands itched for a table to hide behind.

“Rung!” Megatron roared. “Where is Rung?”

“He’s here!” Starscream waved. “He’s here, he’s fine, but—"

The blazing light in Rung’s optics dimmed to something almost bearable. “Megatron?” he said, in a small voice. “Starscream? You’re here?”

Megatron cast the blaster aside and covered the distance to Rung in a few loping strides. He wrapped one of Rung’s hands in both of his own, bending low over him. “We’re here,” he said.

Starscream was shoving at Ratchet again, trying to pry Ratchet’s cable out of Rung’s medical port.

“Get _off,”_ snapped Ratchet.

“He’s fine!” said Starscream. “You said he was fine, now let him go!”

Ratchet scowled, but he released his cable, and Starscream gave a cry of triumph and bundled Rung into his arms.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” said Rung. “Why are all these people here? What happened to Tarantulas?”

“They came to rescue you,” said Starscream. “But I’d already done it, so they’re useless. And I _didn’t_ kill Tarantulas, does that make you happy?”

“Oh,” said Rung. “Oh. Yes.”

Megatron picked both Starscream and Rung up as a unit, cradling them against his chest. He looked, for once in his life, as if he were lost for words.

Then he started to walk.

“Hey!” yelped Rodimus. “Hey, you can’t leave. I want answers! What the pit is going on? Is that really Primus? Why did he reformat me? Hey!”

Megatron kept moving, implacable and also helpfully surrounded by a phalanx of Decepticon ex-soldiers. “I don’t care what you want,” he said. “We’re going home.”

Jazz looked around the room. Deranged scientist on the floor, Ostaros looking a little watery-opticked with whatever fluid he stored in those things. Prowl still tense and brittle, Deadlock gazing up at the ceiling with his hands clapped to his mouth and holy light burning in his optics. Ratchet scowling and rubbing his medical cable, Optimus thoughtful and rubbing his chest. And the newly-minted prime, trying and failing to get his squad to tackle the departing Decepticons.

“You know what,” said Jazz, “I’m actually pretty glad I retired.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Epilogue coming soon :) You can share this chapter on [DW](https://neveralarch.dreamwidth.org/108102.html), [twitter](https://twitter.com/neveralarch/status/1282715736344006656) or [tumblr](https://neveralarch.tumblr.com/post/623544142859059200/apotheosis-chapter-3-desdemonakaylose) \- and we'd love to hear from you in the comments!


	4. I Couldn't Seem to Die

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Who've we forgotten about?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for joining us on this wild ride! No warnings for this chapter - hope you enjoy the little epilogue :) Also, [shapeofmetal on tumblr](https://shapeofmetal.tumblr.com/post/623811127625875456/baby-technorganic-ostaros-with-his-moth-wings) drew Ostaros, please join us in staring at him in wonder!!

The prison warden was hovering over Rung, almost comically so, his huge bulky shape curled as if one of his modes was a protective carrying case ready to snap closed at any sign of trouble.

“I wouldn’t normally let anyone do this,” he said, as they waited for the light on the door to flash green to admit. “Are you _really_ sure you want to go in there alone?”

Rung stood easily, hands folded behind his back, focused on the door only. “Yes, thank you, I’m quite sure.”

The warden continued hovering. He began to fidget, in what probably would have been a subtle way if all the components of his frame hadn’t been so unignorably large.

Rung softened just slightly. “What is your name? I didn’t catch it.”

“...Fortress Maximus,” the warden said, hovering if anything even _more_ intensely. “It’s not that I think—I mean you’re—I mean you _are,_ aren’t you? Like everyone is saying?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Rung said. 

“But you _did_ make a matrix?” Fortress Maximus asked. “And the hot spot, I saw that footage—”

Rung turned, abandoning his formal posture, and gave Fortress Maximus a long, serious look. There was a strained character to the mech’s optics, pulled tight and over-bright. “Go ahead and ask whatever it is that’s on your mind. It’s fine.”

Fortress Maximus shifted from one leg to the other. “It’s just… You were a Decepticon right? Megatron and you—that’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Megatron is my conjunx,” Rung said. “Yes, I was a Decepticon.”

Fortress Maximus’ face crumpled a little. “So were we… I mean, were we wrong? Being Autobots?”

“The war was a war, my dear,” Rung said, as reassuringly as such a thing could be said. “In war there are rarely any truly righteous parties. I wouldn’t take my participation as either a condemnation or an endorsement of either army.”

“Yes, but…”

“Do you regret your choices? Do you feel that you did the wrong thing sometimes, made the wrong calls?”

Fortress Maximus looked away, lip between his teeth. “Some of them, yeah. Too many.”

Rung reached out, gently, and patted the tank on his enormous elbow joint. “I feel that way too,” he said. “We all try to make amends as best we can, and then we have to let it go. I know it’s difficult, but I trust that you can do it.”

There was a light in Fortress Maximus’ optics then, a light that was quickly becoming familiar. Rung wished he believed that it was him and his words that inspired that spark of hope, not just—well. His reputation, one might say.

There was a dull buzzing, and then the door lit green. Rung turned back to the door and set his shoulders. “Please alert me when my half hour visitation is up,” he asked.

Fortress Maximus grunted. The door slid open.

The visitation room had a pane of transparisteel down the middle of it, separating interviewers and interviewees. Rung was familiar with the set up from his first meeting with Whirl, a troubled Autobot who, after the war, had come to be regarded as an untreatable case by every Autobot and neutral therapist left on Cybertron before the authorities decided it was worth trying out a Decepticon. There were microphones on both sides, and speakers that relayed the sound of their voices with a slightly tinny edge. 

Getaway was waiting for him, cuffs in his lap, his expression inscrutable behind the mouthplate and his optics burning with something too intense for comfort.

Rung pulled out the chair on his own side of the room and settled into his seat, folding his hands loosely in his lap, mirroring Getaway. The mech was clean and healthy, not even a weld scar to show where Starscream had done his level best to rip him limb from limb. He was handsome too, it was funny how often MTOs were. As if their designers had wanted them to have something nice before they were dropped on the battlefield to die.

The red, blue and white reminded Rung of Starscream’s old color scheme. He focused on Getaway’s gleaming gold mouthplate, chasing away the phantom sense of familiarity.

“Hello,” said Rung.

“Is it true?” asked Getaway.

Rung didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “I don’t know. I think so.”

“You think so.” Getaway leaned back in his chair. “You think you’re Primus.” There was the suggestion of a chuckle. “Does that make me Unicron?”

“It makes you frightened,” said Rung. “I can see it in your optics.”

Getaway didn’t even twitch. Oh, it wasn’t Starscream that he reminded Rung of—it was Prowl and Jazz, wasn’t it? Jazz’s bluff facade and Prowl’s calculation. Such a deadly combination.

“Don’t worry,” said Rung. “I’m not here for revenge. I just want to understand.”

“Understand?” Getaway shrugged. “What’s there to understand? War vet MTO goes off the rails, shoots at a senator. What can you expect, when he was made for killing?”

Rung didn’t say anything. It was a little unfair, perhaps, to use a therapist’s techniques in the wholly unprecedented situation of a murder victim seeking closure from his killer. But it worked, anyway—Getaway started talking just to fill the silence.

“I always thought I’d love Cybertron, if I got to see it,” he said. “There were some image captures of it in the orientation packet. Shining towers and busy streets. But it’s just a slag heap now, a bunch of scavengers fighting over a ruin.”

He paused for a moment, as if he was waiting for Rung to leap to the defense of what was, apparently, an extension of his divine self. Rung continued to say nothing.

“The thing that really gets to me,” said Getaway, “is that it’s always the worst people who rise to the top. If you ask people on the street to name five senators, they say ‘Starscream’ and then they get stuck. Starscream! A Decepticon war criminal, and he’s the face of government? While Optimus Prime putters around in a basement, filing _paperwork?”_

“Optimus needed a break, I think,” said Rung.

“He doesn’t _deserve_ a break!” roared Getaway. Then he reeled himself back, inch by inch, until he was reclining in his chair again, the picture of relaxation. Rung realized he’d flinched away, and forced himself to sit up straight again, to uncurl his shoulders.

“I thought,” said Getaway, “I _hoped_ that Prowl had a plan. A real victory endgame, not this paper-mache show of a peace. But then he got seduced by Starscream’s pretty wings, and Starscream started talking openly in the senate about defrosting an army, and _someone_ had to do something, don’t you see? I couldn’t let it happen. I had to save everyone.”

“Yes,” said Rung. “I see.”

“I _couldn’t_ let him do it,” Getaway said, his body language growing uneasier, as if Rung’s lack of condemnation had torqued the tension inside of him to nearly unbearable levels. “Starscream’s too ambitious, everyone knows during the war Megatron _barely_ kept him in check, and now he’s a senator, there’s no one above him to yank the leash—who’s going to stop him from consolidating power, who’s going to stop him from bringing another child army into the world, and I’ve got the skill, I’ve got the _calling—_ I was the fastest rookie ever to complete the spec ops training, I could have _been_ someone—all those sparks and Starscream just gets to do whatever the hell he wants with them? Point them at his enemies and have them kill?”

Gently, very gently, Rung said, “Starscream wouldn’t. Not anymore. That wasn’t at all what he had planned—”

“We didn’t even know what it _felt_ like,” Getaway said, his optics far away. “To get hurt, to be hit, in the middle of all those corpses and flying bullets, and we were hardly even _sentient,_ when we hit the ground we were hardly even _sentient.”_

“I understand,” Rung said, and though it hurt him, he _did._ He could feel the ghost of uncomprehending agony spilling across the room as if the divider wasn’t even there. Was this what it was like to be Primus? Knowing that everyone you’d ever made had hurt, and hurt each other when they couldn’t bear the hurt themselves? “I understand,” Rung said again, feeling shaky in his seat. 

All the anger and the energy dropped away from Getaway, and abruptly he was only a mech in cuffs, pitiful in his captivity. “Do you?” he said. “How nice for you. Must be nice to understand everything, your divine primeliness. Are we done here? You done gawking at the soulless war machine now?”

“I don’t think you’re soulless, Getaway,” Rung said. He opened up his hands, offered the empty palms to Getaway, untouchable behind his transparent enclosure. “I think you’re a person who made some bad calls. Not a monster.”

It was small, but there was the slightest flinch in Getaway’s frame. “I made the call nobody else would make,” he said, and turned his face firmly towards the wall. “If you want me to come out of here all sorry that I made your precious senator’s feelings hurt, if you want me to bow and scrape and grovel for doing what everyone else was too _soft_ to do, I won’t. I’ll let them execute me first.”

“That wasn’t why I came here at all,” said Rung. “Anyway, I don’t think execution is on the table. They’re still sorting out the whole ‘justice system,’ but—”

“You want me to apologize for shooting you, then?” Getaway shot him a defiant sidelong look. “That’s all anyone seems to care about now. You kill God one time and suddenly you’re the _bad_ guy. But I’d do it again, if that was the only way. I was made a soldier. If that was what it cost to stop the ‘cons, I’d kill you again, and I wouldn’t lose a night of sleep over it.”

Rung considered him. His handsome, hard-used body; his lab-spliced spark turning beneath the smooth pane of his chest plate; his restless, uneasy shifting. Weren’t they all the same species, regardless of birth? Weren’t they all drawn from the same ultimate font of life, and endless continuum of death and creation—weren’t Rung and he connected, deeply, in way that transcended even the intimacy of murderer and murder victim?

“This is pointless,” Getaway said, and crossed his legs like a barricade between them. “You’re just wasting your time with me.”

“It’s not a waste,” Rung said. “No one ever is.”

Getaway stared at him, his vocalizer clicking and resetting as he audibly groped for words. In the end they just sat there, looking at each other, until Fortress Maximus came to tell Rung his time was up.

\---

Rung let himself into the apartment well after it had grown dark over the city, trying not to make too much noise. Megatron would be in bed by now, probably, and it was anyone’s guess what Starscream would be up to. At best, if Megatron was awake, Rung thought he could perhaps slide into berth and kiss away the exhaustion of such a long day.

But as he gently pulled the door closed behind him and turned to the room, Rung was met with the glittering of a dozen floating lights, suspended and glowing warmly in the darkness of the apartment, all of them at different heights. 

“Oh,” he breathed.

He stepped into the starry dark, reaching up to tap the ball of glass nearest him with one finger. He’d seen them before, at weddings and festivals, but never inside of a house. In the field of their light, his familiar home seemed new again, full of promise, profound and imperishable.

When he turned to the kitchen, Megatron was leaning in the doorway, watching him. 

“Happy anniversary,” he said.

“Oh,” Rung said again, hand to his mouth. “Oh, we missed the date! Oh I’m so sorry, I was going to get you a gift and everything—”

Megatron waved him off. “The only gift I need is that you’re alive and well. Anyway, a date is only an arbitrary point in space and time. There’s no need to get sentimental about it.”

Saying this, he crossed the room to where a pair of glass cubes were laid out on the coffee table, and fished a bottle from underneath. The bottle glowed a very soft lilac, fine and expensive, the kind of engex that Rung loved but rarely ever indulged in: sweet like a dessert and bitter like a memory.

Megatron lowered himself down to the floor, his back resting against the arm of the sofa, and offered up his open hand. Rung took it and allowed Megatron to pull him into his lap where the metal was warm and the thrum of Megatron’s engine was loud and clear.

Megatron poured them both a drink. The saffron yellow lights bobbed gently above them, as the first splash of engex hit Rung’s tongue. 

“This is wonderful,” said Rung. He took off his glasses to wipe away a little unnecessary moisture. When he looked up again, it was to Megatron watching him with a warmth that Rung swore he could feel in his spark.

He set his glasses on the table, leaving himself vulnerable and bare. “I wanted to say…” Rung started, “that is, I was very unkind to you when you were taking care of me. At the hospital. I was angry, but that doesn’t excuse the things I said.” 

“It’s fine,” Megatron said.

Rung frowned. “I meant to hurt you.”

“I know.”

Rung kept frowning. “And you came to get me anyway?”

For a moment, Megatron only savored his drink, his attention somewhere deep inside the lilac froth. At last he said, “I don’t love shortly or shallowly, Rung. Even if you shot me in the very spark, I would still cross a hundred battlefields to find my way back to you. You are my priority, you’re always going to _be_ my priority.”

Rung leaned his cheek against Megatron’s chest plate, considering this.

“I admit I went too far with the Autobot,” said Megatron. “I know it isn’t wartime, and I’m well aware I can’t be judge, jury, and executioner anymore—not without consequences. I took advantage of Starscream’s grief, I pushed him to do things I knew you wouldn’t approve of, and I thought it didn’t matter because with you gone—”

Rung stopped him, then. “Darling, it’s alright. I’m here now.”

“Yes.” Megatron took a deep, shuddering vent, all of that silent emotion flowing through his frame in a gust. “You’re here, where you should be. I’m never going to stop putting you first, Rung, I want you to understand that. If putting you first means breaking some arbitrary laws, or refusing to leave your safety in the hands of some disinterested Autobot burnouts, then that’s what I will do every single time. This is not negotiable. This was the promise I made when I conjunxed with you.” 

Megatron lowered the glass. His gaze was a coal fire in the dark field of his faceplate.

“I will take care of you, even when you make it hard, even if you make it difficult.”

Rung swallowed thickly. For a long time he struggled to take the truth of what Megatron was saying fully into himself, to will himself to believe it; he peeled opened his spark like a burning flower and laid everything that Megatron was inside of it, the troubled and the clean and the dark all together.

The engex was good. He poured himself another glass. 

“I have to ask…” Rung said, circling the rim of his glass with a fingertip, “all this that’s come out, all this news about—about me, and I know you’ve been a lifelong atheist, darling, I just want to know—aren’t you worried about that? About what it means?”

“I don’t give a damn,” Megatron said. “The only thing I know is that you’re home, and right now I don’t care to know anything else.”

He lifted his own glass to his mouth and took a drink, and Rung—warm and close in his arms—believed him. 

A door slammed somewhere in the apartment. “Megatron! Is Rung back yet? I want to—” Starscream rounded the corner and stopped in the doorframe. “Oh. Well, is this a private party or can anyone join? I see you only got two glasses out.”

“You can share mine,” said Megatron, sounding delightfully put-upon. “Sit down.”

Starscream threw himself on the couch and leaned over Megatron’s shoulder to take his drink. “I helped put up the lights, you know. Megatron broke two of them.”

“Because you distracted me,” said Megatron.

“I did not, I only—” Starscream narrowed his optics. “Rung, your face is all wet. Megatron, did you—”

“I’m fine,” said Rung, wiping ineffectually at his optics. “I’m fine. Only—oh, I’m so happy to be home.”

\---

On a cheaply sized electronic missive, of the smallest possible file size, with the least amount of fancy formatting, Deadlock writes:

Dear All,

Going well here as now things have returned to normal or started to anyway. Rung is working again. I approached him vis many of your questions and he has said he has no interest in joining any temple in any capacity and only wants to continue work at the hospital and with his patients who I will not name for the sake of their privacy. Please do not visit the hospital to see him as he is not working on the floors and will not see new patients anyway. Do not pretend to be sick. It will not work. Just today the nurses have turned away three visitors pretending to have vent-whistle it was obvious to everyone that they were playing recordings of someone whistling on their speakers and it was an embarrassment to us all.

In regards to the other questions I have recently been asked I understand there are some spectralists who are keen to know Rung’s favorite color and I have been told that it is white which spectralists will recognize as the color of mental serenity and intellect. If citizens absolutely insist on making sacraments or sacrifices he would prefer you to volunteer your time supporting the new sparklings and especially the batch of constructed sparklings to come after this harvest has been processed. I’m sure you will have already seen his public statement re the compassionate construction bill. 

As always please do not mention this correspondence to anyone not already in the know as Rung will be very cross with me if he finds out that I am engaging in “cultlike activities” which I do not think a newsletter should count as but he will almost certainly not see it that way so thank you in advance for your discretion.

Yours in Primus,

(Drift) Deadlock of Rodion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're wondering what Starscream does with his sudden enforced time off work, let me direct you [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25391620/chapters/62646043)
> 
> If you liked this fic, consider sharing it on [twitter](https://twitter.com/neveralarch/status/1270806564295892995), [tumblr](https://neveralarch.tumblr.com/post/620567976607891457/apotheosis-chapter-1-desdemonakaylose), or [DW](https://neveralarch.dreamwidth.org/107134.html)! Or leave us a comment and we will treasure it!


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